What a lovely article. There's a strong correlation between the energy you put out into the world and what you get back.
I often think that as I end up confirming a grumpy/aggressive person's expectation I'll be a bad customer, or confirming a kind/present persons's expectation I'll be a good one
_-_-__-_-_- 40 minutes ago [-]
What a great site design. Easy to read, simple layout almost comforting.
jacquesm 33 minutes ago [-]
That's quite the story. I have a family member that spent some time on a taxi and the stories are much the same. Assholes aplenty.
fdghrtbrt 2 hours ago [-]
Jarring to see a white person doing this job.
I saw this not because I think certain types of jobs should be done by certain types of people, but because that's what I see happening. So even before reading I knew this guy was going to be unusual in all sorts of ways.
Nice read, thanks for sharing.
ndsipa_pomu 49 minutes ago [-]
Haven't visited Oslo, but I thought Norway was largely a white-skinned population. Why would it be jarring to see a white person doing any kind of job, or are you referring to some kind of job division racism?
micromacrofoot 33 minutes ago [-]
It's the classic racism/classism combo... a lot of taxi drivers are foreigners for example because it can be a stressful and low-paying job at the end of the day.
selimthegrim 37 minutes ago [-]
In a lot of US tourist cities, I would say that’s who is predominantly doing it
micromacrofoot 35 minutes ago [-]
Yes, oddly compared to taxis my experience in the US with pedicabs is that they're almost all white men driving. More of a freewheeling low responsibility type of job rather than providing for a family type situation. I wonder what sort of social shift resulted in this?
xnx 2 hours ago [-]
Quite different than the scam pedicabs that operate in US cities now.
ndsipa_pomu 47 minutes ago [-]
They're popular in London too. The scam seems to be that if tourists don't arrange the price beforehand, it'll be arbitrarily inflated - they don't run a meter like a licensed taxi.
raddan 1 hours ago [-]
What’s the scam?
Waterluvian 1 hours ago [-]
They’ll end up charging you like $120 for a 10 min trip by just being deceptive and evasive about the fee structure.
jacquesm 41 minutes ago [-]
Then you give them the finger and walk away.
Waterluvian 20 minutes ago [-]
It's not that easy. He had those little chains strung across the side exits and wouldn't remove them until I paid. I told him they don't let you out of Canada with that kind of cash but he didn't believe me and laid siege to my day while eating a slice of pizza like a taco. The worst thing was that this was my second mishap with non-combustion locomotion that day. ...I still swear that was not the real Secretariat and that Central Park isn't in New Jersey.
jacquesm 1 minutes ago [-]
Hm. Ok, well, I guess we would have handled that differently.
I had something similar happen in Germany, on the way from the (international) airport to a hotel the driver started some kind of spiel that suddenly his banking machine had broken and he couldn't take card payments. My friend/colleague Jaap who was with me said we'd pay cash and I said no way, and after fiddling for a bit with his phone (mine wasn't a smartphone) gave the driver a different address. When we ended up in front of the police station the driver became a lot more friendly, drove us to the hotel instead and suddenly found that his banking machine had miraculously started working again...
I find that by giving in to such fraud I'm helping to perpetrate it so I've vowed not to let it happen, at the same time there is always a chance that such an interaction would turn violent, after all, they've already decided they want to steal from you. My weighing of this is that they have more to lose than me because I'm a transient and they are not.
Rendered at 13:12:36 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
I often think that as I end up confirming a grumpy/aggressive person's expectation I'll be a bad customer, or confirming a kind/present persons's expectation I'll be a good one
I saw this not because I think certain types of jobs should be done by certain types of people, but because that's what I see happening. So even before reading I knew this guy was going to be unusual in all sorts of ways.
Nice read, thanks for sharing.
I had something similar happen in Germany, on the way from the (international) airport to a hotel the driver started some kind of spiel that suddenly his banking machine had broken and he couldn't take card payments. My friend/colleague Jaap who was with me said we'd pay cash and I said no way, and after fiddling for a bit with his phone (mine wasn't a smartphone) gave the driver a different address. When we ended up in front of the police station the driver became a lot more friendly, drove us to the hotel instead and suddenly found that his banking machine had miraculously started working again...
I find that by giving in to such fraud I'm helping to perpetrate it so I've vowed not to let it happen, at the same time there is always a chance that such an interaction would turn violent, after all, they've already decided they want to steal from you. My weighing of this is that they have more to lose than me because I'm a transient and they are not.