Phone a friend

A while back, when I was complaining about the packed trains during rush hour, my brother Jason mentioned the underground discount taxi service. He told me I could call them up and negotiate a discount for my ride.

He wrote "The one downside to using a discount taxi service is the amount of cell phone chatter you have to bear with during the ride. Apparently a discount driver has 4-5 cell phones: one for Personal, one for the Official Taxi Association, one for the Unofficial Discount Taxi Syndicate 1, and one for the Unofficial Discount Taxi Syndicate 2. Coming from New York however, I think you should be fine since you are used to annoying drivers."

My brother always comes up with great ideas but I wasn't about to call a taxi and negotiate a price with them. It's hard enough getting them to understand my address. Luckily, I learned how to say it in Cantonese: Lobinson doh bat sup sum.

D and I were having dinner with some friends up on the peak and decided it would not be worth our while to wait in the massive line for the tram. We hopped into a cab and to our amazement, it was one of these discount cabbies! No joke there were 16 phones in the cab and they were all ringing simultaneously. There were 8 on the dashboard (see picture above) 3 on the windshield, 3 on the steering wheel, and 2 on the rear view mirror. Every time a phone would ring, it would light up the car.

I just HAD to get a picture of this. I begged D to snap a shot of the inside of the car. I was sitting behind the driver so I was at a bad angle. We didn't even have to use a flash since the phones were bright enough for us to take a decent picture!

The phones rang non-stop and there was chatter coming from each one of them. Talk about multi-tasking! I don't know how the driver was able to concentrate on the road! Although the cabbie didn't offer us much of a discount, he got us to our destination in one piece. I wonder what kind of cell phone plans he has. Hopefully his friends are "in network".