Daylight Limo Rides

Alfa pic credit.

Daytime limousine rides are a rare but sweet kind of fruit. Obvious advantages over night-time runs are the fact that it's light (yes, obviously, but very importantly) that you generally feel better (not exhausted by being awake when the body says go to sleep) and that they finish at a reasonable hour (therefore I can get to bed at the same time as regular people.)

The people who book a stretched limousine from noon until 10:00 pm are different from the night-time crowd too. They tend to be older, richer and happier. Often, the booking is made months in advance.

A recent run was representative. I was to meet eight folks in the parking lot of a local restaurant in The Boss's super stretched SUV. Naturally, he has given me NO details...no idea of who the customers are, where we are going, nor if it's a special occasion. All I have is a time and a place.

But experience told me the people would be fine, as indeed they were. As is usual, the organizer introduced himself to me, and gave me the outline of the day. His friends all arrived, and they're loaded with food and booze and in very high spirits. That's good. Happiness breeds happiness. When I see bottles of champagne, I too am happy.

But not everything is rosy. The airconditioning in this machine works satisfactorily, but not brilliantly. It's a constant refrain from the back, asking that the a/c be turned up. All I can do is to tell them that it will cool down as we get under way, and that it's a big volume of air to cool on a hot Florida day. They don't care. If the least thing is wrong, people bitch. Sigh.

Another pending problem is that I have a navigator on board. A navigator is someone, almost always a guy, who wants to know every turn you plan to make. If you don't describe precisely the route, they'll pick it up and correct it. Unfortunately, this turkey is sitting right at my shoulder...which leads me to raise the divider. Thank goodness for the divider.

The plan was a common one: to Tampa for a matinee live performance (The Jersey Boys) then to an early dinner at a fancy steak house, and then home. That part was easy, and almost quite fun. I had time to read three newspapers, finish my book, make a few calls, spruce up the interior of the limo and take a half-decent lunch. (The latter's not always easy, given how tricky it can be to find a park for the beast.)

After dinner, I was looking forward to dropping off these people and getting home. After all, I'd not finished until 4:00 am the morning before. (More bullshit scheduling from The Boss.) And then came the kiss of death...they wanted to stop for ice-cream. Oh, great. No-one can agree on where to go, and everyone's tired, so they're not communicating. The difficulty for me at a time like this is that I hear three different instructions from the back, but when I try to clarify which ONE I should follow, no-one speaks. It's like I have to play the parent to a bunch of nine-year-olds.

Mr Navigator then springs into action. Okay, if you just make a U-Turn here, he says, pointing hopefully at a break in the median. My eyes roll in their sockets. This thing takes about TEN lanes to make a U-Turn, and gently suggest that another, wider intersection a little up the road will work better. He starts questioning me, asking what I'm doing...

...until he observes for himself PRECISELY how much real estate this damned machine needs for a U-ey.

But it all worked out. And it turns out that they were all real estate agents, on a pep-up trip, hoping and talking themselves into a better year ahead. Good luck with that, guys and girls.

And for a bunch of people who LIVE AND DIE on percentage sales commissions, the tip was abysmal. But I didn't care. I was home in bed before midnight.

On Tiredness

For two days I have not driven further than the grocery store and the beach. There's not much driving work at The Boss's shop anyway at the moment (surprise) but sometimes I need concentrated down-time.

To the untutored eye, the life of the limo driver looks to be a lot about doing nothing. As I say to passersby and other people I talk to whilst on the job, my life is all about waiting. We wait for flights to arrive, we wait for people to emerge from their house, we wait for concerts to finish, we wait for strippers to take the last dollar from the bachelors. Lack of motion defines us.

Except that waiting is not the same as doing nothing, nor is it the same as hanging around at home. Waiting creates a sub-species of stress, based around being ready to spring into action at very short notice. Think of fighter pilots sitting in their jets at the end of the runway waiting for the call to scramble - sure, they're idling, but relaxed they're not.

Not that waiting for an arriving flight is the same as defending the country, although if we fail to find our customer at the airport some of them are prone to starting WW III. That's the stress. It is fear of something going wrong, for which we are blamed. Most people are pretty quick off the mark with a phone call to The Boss if something goes wrong. That tees him up ready to take a swing at us, notwithstanding that we've done everything right.

If the customer takes the wrong escalator to the wrong arrivals hall, it's not my fault. If the customer fails to meet the limo at the previously decided corner, it's not my fault. If the customer fails to tell me that it's not THEM travelling, but their daughter and her boyfriend, it's not my fault if I don't recognize them.

But it ends up that I get heaped upon, because the driver is at the end of the power line, and at the head of the blame line.

So much of my time is spent out-thinking customers. I'll pre-call to confirm arrangements. I'll draw maps and make drive-bys to point out a place I can safely stop. I'll even park up the limo and follow people so I know where they are - drunks are prone to foxing innocent drivers by claiming to not know where they are.

It's all part of being a driver, but with all the sleuthing and figuring out human nature, I sometimes I think I should start a private detective agency.

Haves and Have-Nots

Insane political definitions aside, I have one simple test for defining whether a customer is rich or not. Ahem:

Those who fly in private jets* are rich. Those who fly on airlines are not.

Pretty simple isn't it? The reason I like it is because it is so clear-cut, eg:

Rich people don't mix with poor people at airports - they have their own terminals.

Rich people leave when they are ready, not when the airline says it's okay.

Rich people are orders of magnitude more wealthy than everyone else - to afford that fancy chunk of aerospace magic requires it.


So that's settled then. But that leaves a fair number of The Boss's customers who would disagree with my description. They would - I'm sure - say that they only travel first-class, that they are Diamond-Edged members of such-and-such an airline's Blah Blah club. All well and good, I would say as I drive them to the airport in a Town Car with crappy brakes and 300,000 miles on the clock. (Rich people use rich-people limo companies.)

But the litmus test is this: from a first class seat with an airline, can you stride to the cockpit and tell the pilot that you have changed your mind? That you just don't feel like Vail today, and that you'd rather go to Taos, where you've just heard the snow is perfect? And if you did manage to do that on your airline flight without being shot, gang-tackled, or generally beat-up by everyone on board, would the pilot actually do it?

No. Of course not. Rich people get to change their minds in-flight. The rest of us do not.









[*For consistency I include turboprops in the 'private jet' category, but not piston-powered planes.]

Miss Apprehension

All I'm saying is, if the person blocking everyone at the gas station sports a long blonde ponytail, don't assume it's a woman. Sixties relics can be deceiving from behind.

How about moving your truck and getting outta the way, Miss?!


D'oh.

Majority

One fact about the limo game - there's always something unexpected in the wind. The Boss graciously assigned me a small-stretched run a couple of Fridays ago, six passengers for a local night out, pick-up time 23:30. Twenty-three thirty, that's thirty minutes before midnight.

It's not that unusual, the late-night start. The under-thirty crowd is aggressively nocturnal, apparently, and arriving at a bar close to midnight is cool. By necessity that usually means being there for closing, often a messy thing. Most places in our neck of the woods have a 2:00 am close.

So I resigned myself to another back-of-the-clock night working for peanuts. I had an airport run late-afternoon, so I tried to nap for a while before heading off to prep the vehicle.

Although I'm used to this kind of weird working schedule, a small knot of dread accompanies me with late-night gigs. There's no way to avoid the fact of circadian rhythm, which for most people means slowed thinking processes, tardy reaction times and skewed decision-making. It's the reason pilots must have certain periods of rest between duties, and why the accident rate skyrockets for shift workers. In a potential bomb like a fully-laden limousine, mistakes can be fatal, and with lots of drunk passengers, it's easy to go wrong too.

I began the usual routine, around 9:00 pm. Shower and shave, dress, drive to The Boss's warehouse; check out the car, load the ice, inspect for cleanliness; make sure of the address, lock up and head out, allowing plenty of time to get to the customer's place. I'll need caffeination, so there's a mandatory stop for coffee.

All the time, the start time is bugging me. The Boss, of course, imparts no extra information. All I know is an address, a time, and a total of six people. Nothing more.

Oh, and a cell-phone number. Approaching the condo, I call. The woman on the other end tells me the gate code, and that 'he' will be down shortly. Who is 'he'? Where are the others? How come you're not coming? All questions I want to ask, but cannot.

Travis looked eighteen years old, but was polite and chatty. We were to head off to another address to collect five of his friends. About half-way there he moved forward to talk through the divider. Turns out that he was recently back from Iraq, serving with the US Army. Tonight's limo ride was a gift from his mother...because at midnight he would turn twenty-one.

Click. He was planning his first legal drink as soon as possible. Now I understood.

Good guy. He was the perfect client, the best and brightest indeed, a tribute to his unit. His friends, however, could have done with some of the civility that army life apparently imbues.

But that's another story.