My local minicab firm has installed an automated booking system. This means ordering a taxi now generates so much bureaucracy that I have to factor in an extra ten minutes to my morning routine so I can process all the red tape.
It is no longer a case of simply ringing up and speaking to a bored-sounding bloke with a crackling headset. Now, a snazzy recorded message by a movie-trailer voiceover man set to elevator musak greets you with a series of suggestions about where a cab might take you and gives you a lengthy mission statement explaining that the aim of this minicab firm is to deliver you to your destination in comfort and safety (as opposed to carting you about in agony and peril), that they have developed a groundbreaking in-house database, also for your comfort and safety, and that they are CRB-checked and follow tried and tested lost property procedures…you guessed it, for your comfort and safety.
Eventually, you get through to a human being who takes your order pleasantly enough, but after that the text messages start. The first is to thank you effusively for your booking, give an estimate of the cost and remind you where you are going. A few seconds later another text tells you that the cab has been dispatched and gives you exhaustive details as to the colour, make, model and engine size of the car.
When the cab arrives, another text tells you it is outside, reconfirms the make and model and provides a number should you wish to contact the driver by phone.
At the very moment this text arrives, the driver calls you on your land line. As my mobile is usually in the bedroom and the land line in the kitchen, I have to keep the cab waiting for ages as I run between phones trying to pick up all the messages the arrival of the cab is generating, thus keeping it waiting so long that more often than not it just drives away.
I wouldn’t mind if all the bureaucracy improved the service, but it doesn’t make the journey any more efficient or polite.
Take the driver who picked me up from Heathrow the other day. After a lot of musak and three scrupulously polite text messages, I was met at Terminal Five by a battered silver Toyota driven by a man with a religiously motivated beard who looked me up and down and told me with a hearty laugh that he intended to take me to Pakistan ‘after we are married’.
He spent the journey being so overfamiliar with me that in the end I asked if we had met before. ‘Yes, yes, I drop you at the bar. You always going to the bar, in short skirt, ha ha.’ ‘Excuse me?’
‘You look very nice in short skirt. You don’t remember?’
‘No, seriously, it’s not that I don’t remember. It’s that it wasn’t me.’
‘Yes, yes. You were wearing short skirt, very nice.’
‘Look, I don’t mean to be rude and I’m sure it doesn’t really matter that you’ve mistaken me for a woman of loose virtue, but I would rather you did believe me when I tell you that it really wasn’t me. Just a silly thing, but I would like you to know that unless you worked for a firm called Barry Cabs in Kenilworth in 1986 you will not have seen me going to a bar in a short skirt.’
‘Ha ha. I understand. Don’t worry. I don’t tell anyone.’
When we arrived, I offered him the £40 quoted plus an extra five pound tip.
But he refused to take it. ‘Only 45? I wait long time at Heathrow. I get there early.’
‘Oh, fine, take 50.’
‘So, you show me your photos now.’
‘Eh?’
‘From your trip.’ And he sat in steely determination not to get my bags out of the boot.
‘Hang on,’ I said. ‘I’ve forgotten my key. I will have to knock on the door and get my husband.’ When my mother opened the front door I pushed her back inside.
‘Go away! I’m pretending you’re a man. The taxi driver wants to take me to Islamabad.’ ‘Oh, all right, dear,’ she said, as if this were entirely to be expected.
When I got back he still wasn’t getting my bags. ‘You don’t show me photos?’ he said, looking as if he was about to cry, and not in a nice way, but in a bleakly disappointed way.
I decided I had to get bolshie: ‘Look, mate, you can either insult me and screw me for money or be a friendly local cabbie who comes into my house to look at holiday snaps. Not both.’
He nodded solemnly. ‘I understand. I look at photos another time.’ Oh, great.
Melissa Kite is deputy political editor of the Sunday Telegraph.
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