As Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver showed, a lot can happen when you're making a living behind the wheel. This job can expose you to the raw, unfiltered reality of urban life in just a single shift, leading you to encounter all sorts of characters and situations.
To learn more about this enigmatic profession, Reddit user CatSk8Scratch made a post on the platform, asking everyone from the industry to share the things they experienced on the job that they just cannot forget. Here are the most upvoted replies.
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#3
It was about 4am on a really foggy Sunday and I was heading back to the Taxi rank. I was heading through a bridge with a dual-carriageway above it when I spot a person on the bridge. The road on this bridge has no pavements it this caught my eye. I pull up at the side of the road to get a closer look (due to the fog) and realise it's a young woman on the wrong side of the railings. I immediately call 999 and request police and an ambulance then jump out of the taxi to talk to her. I've dealt with my own mental health issues in the past as well as having a few people close to me that suffer from various issues. I got her chatting about her life, general things. I shared from my life too in the hopes of connecting or at the very least distracting her. Eventually the paramedics and police arrive and long story short she was alive. It was terrifying to see someone in pain and all I could do was to chat about random stuff.
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#5
I have a relative who is one. One night, near the end of his shift, he’s at the front of the line up, and a bunch of guys say they want to go somewhere pretty far. It’ll be a really big fare, especially for the end of the night. But something about it is making his hair stand up. He says no, that’s too far for him and he’s going home soon. He tells the driver behind him not to take these guys. The driver laughs, calls my relative a dumb N word, and takes the guys. Next day? The other driver is found dead. They robbed and murdered him. He lost his life, for the promise of a $100 dollar fare. Always trust your gut!
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#10
I had a habit of asking this question to every cabbie in every taxi I took for a few years. One that sticks with me is the cabbie was stopped at a red light and a body landed on the hood of his car, smashing the hell out of it (s*icide jumper from a condo balcony). I felt pretty bad for asking because he didn’t seem to want to relive that.
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Back in the 90’s I did some cabbing in a small South Coast town in England. We had contracts for some school runs, normally these were to pick up kids who’d been excluded from state schools. One day I had 3 lads in the car aged about 9-12 I’d say. Kid in the front was arguing with one in the back and called him a wanker. I quietened them down and it was silent for about a minute. Kid in the front then pipes up “What is a w*nker?” I said “I don’t think that’s the sort of thing I should be telling you lads. Ask your parents. What do you think it is?” He ponders for a moment and says “Well, I’ve always presumed it’s part of a woman.” Nearly crashed!
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Not a cab driver, but I gave a cab driver a story to tell. I was a stock analyst on a marketing tour. These consist of giving a breakfast presentation, flying to a different city to give a lunch presentation, etc.. I had my breakfast presentation in Zurich and went to the airport to get the flight to Geneva. It was cancelled. So I had a problem: there would be 25 important clients in Geneva waiting for me at a very expensive restaurant. So I walked over to the cab line and asked a young cab driver how long it would take to get to Geneva. He looked stunned and said "I've never been to Geneva", which I thought was rather odd. He called his dispatcher and told me it would be 2 and 1/2 to 3 hours. So I said "Would you like to got to Geneva?". He really lit up. So I spent the next few hours chatting with this pleasant young guy. Apparently I made his day. He got me there with a few minutes to spare. I don't actually remember the fare (I think it was 900 francs but this was in 2000) and gave him a huge tip. Man - he was a happy guy.
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#30
Friend of mine drove cab near a naval base in the 1970s, told me this story: He picked up two sailors late at night, who gave him directions to a grocery store. He drives them there, it’s obviously closed. In the deserted parking lot of the closed store, the guys pull out an ice pick, with the obvious intent of robbing him at ice pick point (weird, but definitely sufficiently menacing). He’s white, the two guys are black. He was also in the GI movement at the time (vets and service members organizing against the Vietnam war). So he makes eye contact with the guy holding the ice pick in the rear view mirror and starts casually talking about the work the movement was doing to bring black and white sailors together, advance black issues. They looked at him for a minute, then put the ice pick away and got out.
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#31
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Some lady tipped me a bag of frozen trout.
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#40
Uber, not taxi, but I will never get over the drunk/high yuppie bros. I picked them up from a golf tournament. They were cooked out of their minds. They made me go to a drugstore so they could buy drinks and cigarettes. They made me go through a Wendy's so they could get snacks and kept trying to order fried chicken like it was a KFC. The woman taking their order was not amused. I drove them to their stupidly fancy neighborhood full of mcmansions. They talked about how they married hot twins and asked if I wanted to see nudes (I passed) and then asked if I wanted to go do coke with them in their yard (I passed on that, too). They were both so fried that I got tipped twice. The first one tipped me twenty bucks and the second one tipped me twenty bucks because he "knew" that his friend was a cheap bastard who didn't take care of me. They were intolerable by being arrogant and friendly in the way only high a******s can be. But overall it was a good trip.
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Been driving for 15 years, lots of stories. Picked up two guys took them to the bar, gave them my card, and they called me to take them home. They convinced me I needed to see the house one of them built, beautiful woodwork. They wouldn't let me leave, they just gave me $$$ to watch them do c*ke and listen to their stories, mist were incoherent nonsense. One though stuck in my head. They made their money in network TV, sports. They did it all, camera, sound, lighting then they were in charge of crews. Once one of them had some money, he took his family to Europe on a long trip. One day in France his grandpa asked where they were going tomorrow. He told him "Chateau St Whatever" and his grandpa freaked out and said he couldn't go there. Later that night, after several drinks, his grandpa explained he dropped bombs on that city in WW2.
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#52
I used to drive cab and worked mostly nights. I liked working the strip clubs because the girls there were genuinely nice and always tipped well. They would usually just tell me how rough their night was. They always just wanted to vent a little. One night, a young woman offered me a bl*wjob in lieu of her fare. Her fare was $8... lol Another time, a kitchen manager who I gave rides to all the time called me at the end of my shift saying he REALLY needed me to come pick him up. He had obviously had the s**t beat out of him the night before, his hair had been butchered, and he had an AR-15. I was working a day shift, covering for another cabbie. I get a call to pick up the old f****r at a local watering hole. He was s*itfaced and immediately started arguing with me about the fare. Said he wasn't gonna pay, and I needed to just take him where he needed to be. I took his a*s to the edge of town and kicked him out of my cab and gave him a single plastic bottle of water. It was August in N California, and the temp was like 102°.
