How We Roll

The idea is simple. You tell The Boss what time you'd like a pick-up, I arrive ten to fifteen minutes earlier than that time and wait in your driveway. If I'm late or there's a problem, you will receive a phone call; if you don't receive a phone call, you can expect that I'll be waiting at the address provided, at the time stipulated.

Moreover, all the drivers I know are smart people. If we're at your house at 5:05 am for a 5:15 am pickup, we won't ring the doorbell. I have no clue as to how your household's constituted - who sleeps late, who rises early, whether there are children, whether your wife got up at 4:00 am to cook you pancakes.

All of that is unknown to me, so it seems logical to use a fall-back idea, which is that no-one wants their door-bell rung before the sun's up.

That, sir, is how we roll.

Next time, instead of phoning The Boss to complain that your airport ride isn't there, do something more logical. Open your front door, or open your garage door and

SURPRISE

look at the nicely dressed man with the shiny Lincoln waiting for you.



'55 Thunderbird from here [link]

August Blues

It's Thursday and the only job this week was my eavesdropping sortie early Monday morning. When I started contracting my services to the Boss three years ago, he had ten drivers on the roster, seven of whom were full-time equivalent. Now we are three and a half drivers, sharing what amounts to work for one.

We are contractors because Boss man is allergic to full-time jobs. They create Social Security and payroll tax obligations, and obligations don't sit well with him. So we drivers are all self-employed, or, as I like to call us, minimum wage contractors. What the IRS does to us would be banned under Geneva Treaty protocols, but it is what it is.

The flip side of that coin is that The Boss would be out of business right about now if he had full-timers. Every facet of the business is down, from the airport transfers to drunken party nights. Granted, we live in a small market, but it's a wealthy community that has become averse to spending. Here on the Gulf Coast of Florida everyone's confidence was based for decades on rising real estate prices. When that bubble burst, a lot of well-paid jobs went with it, and as the economy goes, so goes the limo business, only more so.

As ever, necessity is the mother of invention. There is no making a decent living driving, and unlikely to be one for the forseeable future, so everyone has to adapt. That's how I'm spending all my time lately, working a couple of different plans, happy to take the crumbs when The Boss offers them.




Benz roadster from here [link]

Let's Go Drop Some Eaves.

Eavesdropping is rude, and I do my best not to listen. But what is a working driver to do when people insist on using the phone within earshot? Towncars aren't equipped with a compartment divider like the stretched limos, so as much as I try to tune out, it's sometimes beyond me.

The secret is that customer phone calls often keep me awake. Even our airport trips are at least an hour one-way, so accidentally overheard private conversations alleviate the hypnotic effect of the freeway. It's a safety enhancer, right?

This morning's job is a case in point. The 4:30 am pickup was in a nice gated community, the likes of which Florida is infested - fancy golf-course, large lots, big houses, families. I know this family; thankfully they're normal.

Except this morning. When the front door finally opened at 4:45 am, I heard raised voices. An argument? Before sunup? Who has the energy?

One of the daughters was returning to college. Her mother was at her, talking overly loudly, clearly agitated. The father looked harried, still half asleep, appearing to need a stiff drink.

With the usual "Oh, I forgot my....." rush back inside, we left at 4:55, to the sound of Miss texting furiously in the back seat. Interesting, I thought, to whom is she texting at that time? Not her college room-mate, I'd guess.

After about ten minutes, she called her mother, and here's what I learned from the conversation over the next forty minutes:

- she attended college in a distant state
- she'd acquired a boyfriend eight months ago, of whom the parents disapproved
- parents had predicted it would end badly
- this last weekend, parents flew to see daughter
- they didn't tell her they were coming
- they arrived on her doorstep with the intention of having her ditch the b/f
- that didn't go so well
- the three of them returned to Florida
- it was a tense weekend
- the parents wanted to tell the b/f directly he was no longer welcome to date their daughter
- daughter thought this was an over-reaction
- daughter wanted to break-up her own way
- parents weren't convinced
- daughter now tired of parents "controlling every damn thing in my life"
- she won't have time to see the b/f this semester anyway

Thank goodness for family drama. My driving was particularly alert and smooth this morning.




Early cellphone photo from here [link]

Surprise!

Jaded as your average limo driver might be, some things can still surprise us.

No, it won't be a couple (or a group) orgy-izing in the back of a stretch and it won't be sweet young things drinking until they puke. It won't be centi-millionaires not tipping, and it definitely won't be idiocy on the roads.

While waiting for my non-dancing folks on the weekend, I was surprised by Florida's governor gently descending the escalator into baggage claim at Tampa airport. His relatively new lady wife accompanied him, which was, frankly, way more of a highlight than the presence of Mr Crist in such a plebian setting. She's hot, as befitting a New York society gal.

Two points of note. One, Mr and Mrs Floridian Governor travelled on Southwest Airlines, just like the rest of us. And, two, he waited for his own luggage for forty minutes like the rest of us. Bags might travel free on Southwest, but we aren't re-united with them speedily.

As you would expect there were cops and bulky guys in suits milling around, but they remained low-key. Poor unsuspecting folks were randomly accosted by the smiling, handshaking guv, looking precisely like the politician he is. Florida's not a big enough stage for him - he's currently running for US Senate, so I guess he's winning votes one glossy grin at a time.



Pic from here [link]

Misunderestimation

You have seen me at airports, in the baggage claim area. I'm the guy with the long-sleeved white shirt and tie, suit vest or jacket, and a sign with a name on it. The name will be that of the person I'm meeting.

I wear a look of distant boredom. Making eye contact with hundreds of strangers is tiring, so I focus on the middle distance and try to appear like I'm not scoping out the fun parts of ladies.

Time passes. The object is to find my customer amongst the sea of transitory humans who are all, also, looking for someone. Hence the sign.

The sign is important for two reasons. It keeps most people away - I'm someone else's and I'm not available to dance. The sign is meant for the one with whom I have been promised a dance. Sure, it's an odd kind of dance involving them sitting behind me while I drive, me being super-polite, and me be transparently obsequious, but it's a dance nonetheless.

Which is why today was so odd. I was there, looking blank, with a sign. The people who were looking for me saw the sign. They decided not to make themselves known to me.

The people - a mother and two teens - didn't know the steps of the dance. I saw them look and point, but people do that all the time. They didn't look, point and then walk up to me.

That's the way the dance works; I do not know you, and likewise you do not know me. It's my job to provide the sign, and it's your job to recognize your name. And then walk up and stand in front of me. If you choose not to participate in the dance, even after you have said you would, be not surprised if I go home.



Pic from here [link]

Chug, Chug, Stop.

It wasn't so much the fact of running out of gasoline. If it hadn't been me, it would have caught one of the other drivers. So it was just my karma that led to me rolling to a stop on the side of I-75. Dead engine, dead limo. And two customers wondering what kind of cracker-jack outfit The Boss runs.

The warning signs had been there for a while. One other driver asked me a couple of weeks before if I'd noticed weirdness with the gas gauge on that particular limo, a six-passenger. I thought nothing of it. Standard procedure for all drivers is to fill the tank after each run, so the next run can start with a minimum of set-up time.

There was absolutely no reason to think the tank was anything but full.

That day's job was to collect two people to drive them to Orlando for the Cleveland-Orlando NBA final. They had tickets three rows up from the Cav's bench. Pretty big night.

I did my usual prep work: Ice in the bars and a cooler-full in the trunk; water, soda, juice, a couple of newspapers; vacuum and clean the windows. Start the engine, and note that the gas is showing full. Everything normal.

We drove about thirty miles before the thing coughed, coughed, chugged and stopped. You can imagine the sinking stomach I had, wondering what the hell I'd done to deserve this miserable fate. It turned out that the previous driver had not filled the tank after her run even though she'd driven at least 180 miles...because the gas gauge showed full. This in a car that (at best) gets about 15 miles per gallon. She apparently thought the damn thing ran on air that night.

The deeper problem is that The Boss doesn't encourage the kind of feedback that might have caught the problem then and there. Had the driver mentioned "Hey, the weirdest thing - I drove all around last night, and the gas gauge didn't budge from full" any normal business owner might have investigated.

And saved the whole misadventure.

There is a vaguely happy ending. The Florida Highway Patrol man (breakdown division, not the tax-collection types) happened along around ten minutes later. He had about one third of a gallon of gas, which was plenty to get me to the next exit and a service station.

After a speedy cruise up I-75 and I-4, a sneaky end-run the back way to Amway Stadium, my folks were just in time for tip-off.

Perhaps karma works both ways.

Oh, and the problem was diagnosed as a faulty sender unit in the tank. And it's still that way today. It really is a cracker-jack business.



Pic of 1964 Lincoln from here [link]

Three Chauffeur Sins

There are three mistakes never to make as a chauffeur:

1. Refrain from punting the limousine into the scenery.

2. Never, ever lose your cool with customers.

3. Never, ever run out of gasoline.

Guess which one of these rules I broke last spring?


Pic from here [link]

The Network

After a while, people get to know who you are. Word spreads, impressions are made, value judgements are lodged in brains.

I know this because I do it myself. This checkout person at the supermarket is better than that one, and I look for her; that bartender smiles and engages so I tip more; I never attend the Church of Starbucks because (with rare exception) they all suck.

Customer service is a battle of millimetres, fought to the tipping point, at which point all is lost or all is gained. Someone should write a book about that. (Ironic Joke.)

So when people start asking me to help them with limo or towncar bookings, I smell something's up. They'd rather deal with me than The Boss, who, more than ever, could give a shit.


Photo of the Cadillac Eldorado from here [link]

The Boss

In the past, when I listened to self-improvement tapes while I ran or walked, most of it literally went in one ear and out the other. Not much stuck inbetween. One thing that did, however, is the idea that many of us are mentally stuck in high school.

It appeals to on a visceral and a logical level. I saw it in myself, I guess, and that brought home the horror of being a fully physically mature man and still a mental adolescent. What an awful thing. And you know what? I have found this again, in the figure of The Boss.

It's not new to me, given that I've been living with this thing for years, but events of recent times show me that it's time the veil of anonymity be raised, if ever so slightly. I want to bring this face of stupidity right out in the open, if only for my own fun. As a man I trust completely says, to think bad things is one thing, but to do them is quite another.

I wonder where blogging about a complete douchebag fits?



Cartoon from here [link]

WORK

Man, I am tired.

Work popped up out of nowhere over the last two weeks, which characteristic of any service industry should be well known. And still people are surprised.

Now, to pay that dentist's bill...




Courtesy link [link]