Several years ago my boyfriend and I had planned a really nice day for ourselves in Washington D.C. Since we were college students in Baltimore and didn’t have a car at the time, we bought train tickets and planned to catch a cab to the train station, about 15 minutes away.
That morning we walked to a busy intersection near our apartment building that always had plenty of cabs passing through to catch a ride to the train station, expecting to wait only a few minutes at the most. Unfortunately, for some reason there was an unusual cab shortage that morning and we waited more than fifteen minutes without as much as seeing one. When we finally sighted one we frantically hailed it and it pulled up right in front of us. Out of nowhere, a woman pushes in front of us and throws herself into the cab. This is not at all the norm for the area, where in general people are polite and do not do this sort of thing. We were taken aback and might have let it go, but we were running late that that point. My boyfriend put his arm into the cab door and politely asked the woman to let us have the cab since it had obviously stopped for us and we were trying to catch a train. Her response? “Too bad you weren’t fast enough,” with a condescending sneer.
The driver was obviously not interested in getting involved, so we got into the cab with her since there was plenty of room (it had two rows of seats), we had no idea when another one would come along and calling one was likely to take another 15 minutes. The woman tried her best to get us to get out by acting nasty, but we politely but firmly stood our ground. It turns out that the place she so desperately needed to go, to the point that she needed to steal our cab, was a vegan cafe just north of campus that was only a five-to-ten minute walk down the street. She was wearing the cafe t-shirt and was obviously waitstaff, and most likely late for her shift. But with the morning traffic the drive probably took as long as the walk would have!
During the (short) ride there she muttered insults under her breath, glared at us and continued to sigh loudly. When we reached the cafe she threw a few dollars at us and snarled, “You’re welcome!” before slamming the door – as if she had done us a big favor in “allowing” us to share the cab she had stolen! Because the cab ride took us in the opposite direction of the train station and the whole ordeal had taken quite some time, we did end up missing our train. Luckily we were about to catch another one an hour later and ended up having a splendid (albeit somewhat shortened) day out.
To this day I refuse to eat at that particular cafe, which is notorious for having mediocre vegan food and rude, slow service. Go figure! 1122-10
This is a first for the site. A story about someone stealing a hailed taxi cab from another. Come on all you big city denizens! I’m sure there are more stories to tell.
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