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I Swear I Thought That Was My Taxi Posting Date: Jan 6 2008 12:02AM Here’s how it played out … as best as I remember it.
We booked a taxi, like, days in advance. New Year’s Eve is a busy taxi night, for obvious alcohol-related reasons, so we all put our heads together, realized none of us were likely to be in any condition to drive, and reserved a taxi cab for the trips to and from the bar. If I were a taxi company, I wouldn’t take reservations days in advance from people who are clearly planning to become totally polluted on the night of the booking, but that’s just me. But I guess I don’t have that devil-may-care entrepreneurial spirit that makes people rich and gets their 1985 Crown Victorias filled with puke, so that’s a shortcoming of mine that I’ll just have to live with.
As a responsible adult, lining up a night of drunken tomfoolery is all about risk management. Drinking used to be all about taking risks. Back in college, when you planned a night out drinking, you knew the odds were pretty good that something near-catastrophic was going to happen. You might sprain an ankle or perhaps lose a shoe in a hedge somewhere. You were pretty much guaranteed to leave for the night with something like $30 in your wallet, then wake up the next morning to find three bucks and an ATM receipt reminding you that you withdrew the last $50 from your account to buy roast beef sandwiches for everyone on your intramural inner-tube waterpolo team.
Those, however, were pedestrian risks. The real dangers were things like getting arrested for relieving yourself on a neighbour’s Springer Spaniel or dragging a Road Closed sign six blocks so you could leave it on the front porch of the old lady next door who has been sitting at her window for six months watching and waiting for you to do something just stupid enough that she could call the cops on you. You could also find yourself in an awkward social situation, like sleeping with your head in a waste paper basket on your history professor’s driveway with his seventeen year old daughter.
Those were the good old days. Now, going out for a night on the town starts when you book the taxi a week in advance and pre-pay on MasterCard. Then, everyone lays in a hang-over kit of bottled water and Advil, and puts fresh sheets and towels in the guest room. You send the kids over to grandma’s house for the night so they won’t accidentally walk into the bathroom at 3:00 am to find you with your boxer shorts caught in your zipper and a Long Island iced tea stain on your Dockers.
Of course, most of the time, real grown-ups don’t have to worry about these worst-case scenarios because the night of drinking usually wraps up around 10:00 pm. Not much nefarious activity takes place before the late news comes on, so when New Year’s Eve arrives with its unavoidable post-midnight conclusion, it’s a disaster waiting to happen, reserved taxi or not, so really, it’s not my fault.
When we came out of the bar, it was exactly 1:00 am – the time we had requested the pick-up taxi to arrive. There was a car in exactly the same spot our cab had dropped us off four hours earlier. The driver looked exactly like our driver, meaning it was a man with dark hair and a hat. I looked to make sure that the car was from the same cab company we were using, and it was, meaning that it was probably a white car and it had stripes. The back door was open, so I got in, and reduced the risk by putting on my seat belt and falling asleep.
It’s not every day that you wake up in the backseat of a police cruiser as it idles in your driveway with its flashy white and red lights alerting the neighbourhood to your safe arrival home, but then not every day is the first day of the New Year. Happy 2008. |
