Here are couple of ex Mujaheddin DC cab drivers taking a break and reminiscing about their rocket propelled grenade days at the Exxon station located in front of the Ritz Carlton on 22nd street. This Exxon is the new hot spot for DC cabbies and I am pretty sure the lucky guests at the Ritz are thrilled about the view from their expensive hotel rooms. Please don't forget the homeless,
Mad Cabbie.
25 comments:
They probably have the RPG in the trunk Mad!
Left Nut
Uncle Mad, you have arrived! Before I could read your post tonight, I had to AGREE that I understand that your blog may have ADULT content and that I want to see it anyway.
Not only is Big Brother watching, Tiresome Old Aunt is, too.
Peggy's mom
p.s. All's swell in Petworth, except I did not bring back my liberry books on time. tsk!!
When did they decide that your blog had adult content?
What adult content? This is a family oriented blog.
Hey Peggy's mom, I see more and more white people walking their dogs on Georgia Avenue! I guess Petworth is safer now even though I can see fear in the dogs eyes!
Hey Left Nut, aren't you supposed to be locked up?
Mad - Glad to see you back, missed you there. Sorry about your dad. That car you took the picture in front of has a VA insp sticker...what gives? You should do a post about your particular car you drive, what it is, why you choose it, etc.
Michael
michael_3653 _at_ hotmail.com
That car with partial sticker showing is not mine, I drive a 1996 Chevy Caprice LT1! I am a Chevy man. I don't drive a sissy ass Crown Vic or Grand Marquis like Phil the dispatcher does. Even though it's a 1996, it's in a top condition! I think my cab is one of the most maintained cabs in Washington. Just last last summer I dropped $3000 to upgrade all kind of shit. I feel safe and powerful in this monster. Few days ago some punk with a 3 series BMW tried to race on 95 north four in the morning....few minutes later he was so far away I couldn't see him in my rear view mirror! I usually obey the law but every now and then my testosterone rage kicks in!
That's sick, I don't see too many bubble caprices in DC - tons of old Crown Vics and Grand Marquis, but only a few old chevys. Do you know why there are so many nice ass cars as cabs in DC too? I've seen Lexuses, just the other day I saw like a 2000+ S-Class Sun Cab, there's a yellow 2004ish Escalade ESV I always see around Cleveland Park late at night. Also - have they ever lifted the restriction on outside-dc residents registering their cabs in DC? I've always thought about getting into hacking but they aren't offering the test for new drivers like at all anymore and I live in Arlington. Thought about trying to hack in Arlington, but I'm afraid of getting sucked into it.
Michael
michael_3653 at hotmail.com
Every GM car that I have ever had, except for the Cadillacs, has been J-U-N-Q-U=E. I have had two GM cars as cabs, and they were J-U-N-Q-U-E. Every Chevrolet that any of my relatives has had has been J-U-N-Q-U-E.
SO, if driving a car that stays off the ass end of a tow waggon is 'sissy', let me adjust my petticoats and zip up my party frock.
I am glad to know that you, Mr. Mad Cabbie, have money to pay for the root canals of foul-breathed mechanics, the bar bills of obnoxious tow truck drivers and the Kollidge Edge-uh-mah-kayshinn of their children. Full time hacking must pay well, these days. Too bad that the shops and tow companies are getting all of yours.
Mike if you want to start hacking start in DC unless you want to be a slave for the cab companies in Va or Md...here in DC we own the the cabs, at least for now. Regarding the restriction and tests Phil might be able to answer your question if he is kind enough.
Phil, you are mistaken my friend1 Ask your buddy Hassan about the Chevy LT1s, he knows a thing or two about cars. And it's not about having money to blow away Mr South Boston, It's about having the discipline and the mentality of reinvesting in your business wisely, which unfortunately most of DC cab drivers don't have. They rather bribe $50 the niggers downtown to have their junk pass inspection. And yes hacking in DC pays very well if you know how to play your cards right! You know that Phil. Just by sitting in that dispatch room you know you are loosing CAS$ Vs hustling the streets.
One of the more famous quotes from the Senor:
"Chevy no good! Chrysler the best! Chrysler African-Proof!"
If paying the tow waggon and mechanics on a weekly basis is 'wise-reinvestment', then I need to waste some more money, because my 'sissy' Grand Marquis last went to the shop for inspection and before that for routine oil changes and brakes. .........ohmigoodness!, there goes that brassiere strap and I simply must re-adjust my garter straps, again, and these petticoats are such a bother!........really, these 'sissy Grand Marquis'........... You could not pay me to own a Chevrolet. They are JUNQUE.
By sitting in that dispatch room, I am not burning gasolene, and I am not getting picked on by Officer Green and his Hack Inspector Funsters. I am not losing a dime, sitting up there. If I were, I would be out on the street more. Some of those guys might be losing something, but I AIN'T losing NOTHING.
I will not pay to get something through 'inspuckshon', as the Senor pronounces it. I swear, that guy is perpetually at 'inspuckshon'. Anyhow, if something is wrong, I have it fixed. FIFTY BUCKS? Where have you been, Mad Cabbie? You are truly mad. Fifty bananas will get you a red sticker for the next eight trips because you made those hater asswipes angry.
Some people pay just so they do not fail for a scratch or two or an old newspaper that they found under the seat. As I posted to one of your earlier posts, if they gave a cab driver a fair shake at that hellhole called the Test Station, ninety per-cent of their problems would go away. But since we are dealing with a progressive authoritarian gubbamint, they are so much smarter than anyone else, so they do not listen to me.
...and I AIN'T from Southie, I am from the North Shore.........
Phil, you have gone with three different cabs while I have the same cab! Let's see how long that Grand Marquis is going to last.
Enough said!
I have always gotten rid of them after about four or five years.
At some point, Dear Revered Leader Kim il-Fenty is going to have the People's Taxikab Kommissariat make everyone get rid of those old cars.
I will not be amoung those scrambling for a car nor will I be amoung those whom the rip-off artists will be trying to butt rape.
It is better to be paying a car note than a mechanic bill and do not try to tell me that you are not paying mechanic bills on a car that old.
I will tell you how long that Grand Marquis will last: four to five years and I will get another car.
Truth be told, the best car that I ever had as a cab was that 1990 Town Car. It had that old Ford 302 engine that, like John Barleycorn, proved the strongest one at last. I was going to pay some money to put that one back together in righteous fashion, but the rumours were running around that First Party Secretary A. Williams and Supreme People's Kommissar D. Tangherlini were going to hand down the order to L. Williams, then Chief Kommissar of the People's Taxikab Kommissariat, to make everyone buy new cars. It did not happen, but I was afraid to spend all that money and have a car that I would not be able to use.
There are some regulatory changes on the way, none of which are going to help the drivers, many of which are going to harm us. The People's Progressive Authoritarian Party, which currently controls the People's Demokratik Republik of New Kolumbia, has demonstrated that it cares nothing for us.
If the Hotel and Restaurant Association wants it, it gets it. Since they can not run their own businesses, they have decided that they are going to micromanage ours, and they pay Dear Revered Leader Kim il-Fenty well to do it.
Mr. Withrow, Diamond #32 once expressed this to me in slightly different words, but my version is: If ya' AIN'T got the votes, and ya AIN'T got the money, ya' gotta' pull down your pants, bend over and walk butt first. Bring you own vaselene.
There is actually something that we could do, but if I posted it here, the FBI would be at my door to-morrow. Besides, the gubbamint knows that we are a bunch of middle aged and old men and that we are not going to do anything.
By the way Phil, if you are really doing better dispatching than hacking, I guess old man Best is paying you well over $30/hr.
In my years of experience, I have found that cab drivers tell all kinds of stories. There are, however, three kinds of stories that cab drivers tell the most:
1. How LITTLE they make (to the Internal Revenue). I know, more than a few do not file, but eventually, the Internal Revenue catches up with most of them. More on that, in a minute.
2. How MUCH they make (to everyone else).
And the biggest story of all:
3. How often they go home with their female passengers.
As for the tax thing, that is another regulatory thing that is coming down the pike. District resident, or not, cab drivers are supposed to be paying the Franchise Tax. They were supposed to be paying it all along, but it was never enforced. There was something on the books for years that stated the Finance and Revenue was supposed to sign off on your PUC card (that was what you filled out before the One Stop Card). I never saw a space for them to sign off on one on any PUC card, and there AIN'T NO space for them to sign off on the One Stop Card. As you will recall, two years back, you had to fill out all of this PW when you renewed your registration. It was information that was going to Finance and Revenue to let them know that you existed. District residents should have been filing the Franchise Tax all along with their annual personal income tax returns.
Those who were at the meeting at THE ARC, where DCTC and Finance and Revenue Officials made presentations, heard the Officials state that they would be coming after those who did not pay the Franchise Tax, regardless of the Jurisdiction of Residence. They stated that they would be coming after the owners, first. They also stated that they would subsequently come after the renters, as they are also supposed to pay. They would catch up with the owners when they renewed the registration, and the renters when they renewed the face.
If you do not pay the tax, you will go to renew and there will be a flag on your file that states 'Finance and Revenue'. You will report to that office, where they will hold up a card that unfolds and drops to the floor, because you will owe so much. With fines, interest and penalties, it will be more than most can pay. This is how they plan to get rid of many veteran drivers, or even those who have been out there a few years.
Despite all this, many drivers still are not paying. At some point, there will be a flood of District drivers heading back to Red Top, Alex Airport Bandit Taxi Service, Barwood and Blue Bird, as well as back to the 7/11 and the parking lots.
You may rest assured that the Finance and Revenue will be sharing the information on non-payers with the Internal Revenue as well as the Taxing Authorities of your Jurisdiction of Residence. That is legal.
As for the thing with the female passengers, be careful of that. There was a Persian guy a few years back. He drove cab #466. I forget his name, now, but I could find it in the computer at Diamond, easily enough. Anyhow, he took this drunken female home from a party in Tenleytown to South Arlington, just on the North side of Walter Reed Drive. According to him, she took off her dress in the back seat of the cab and asked him to do her. Now, he was a miserable looking little lump of a man, and she was an attractive woman, so, of course, he honored her offer of her honour, and was soon on her and off her. So she puts on her dress, goes into the house and he goes home to that high rise on Glebe Road near the entrance to Green Valley.
Anyhow, this broad calls the Arlington Police and cries 'rape'. So the cops call Jacobs, who manages to find out where the guy lives and the Arlington Police show up on his doorstep. I can just imagine, here this guy is sipping a drink, basking in the afterglow of the first piece that he has had in a long time, and here come da' fuzz! Turns out that this broad has done this to several Virginia drivers from the various jurisdictions out there as well as to two D.C. Yellow drivers. They all told the same story. Anyhow, they took the guy's face, because the lawyer that one of Diamond's fleet owners got him did not want to spend to much time on him, so he wound up making some kind of deal. I did not hear about all of the other drivers, but the ones that I did hear about got off, because of the similarities of the stories.
This woman lived with her boyfriend, but it seems that he travelled for business frequently, and she was a party girl who got horny when she got a little liquor in her. The moral of the story is, keep it sheathed when you are behind that wheel. You are out there for one thing only, to make money. That goes double for these days of SIDA. When we were young, the worst that happened to you was that you were out of action for six weeks, and you could not give blood anymore. It AIN'T the same, these days.
In all my years of cab driving I have done only one gal passenger. Actually she was an older broad 42, and I was 27 at the time. She was in town to drop off her freshman daughter at AU....to make the long story short I ended up being her roommate for couple of nights at her hotel room. But like you said, cab drivers bullshit about how many pussy they get every night. I do get offers every now and then but I am smart enough to zip my pants tight enough.
I paid all my DC taxes when I lived in the city and I pay all my taxes in Maryland. Every morning when I go home I dump all the figures of the night in to my Quicken software and by the end of the year I export the shit to my turbotax and I am done. I am happy, the federal goverment is happy and the state of Maryland is happy. To me money is a tool for survival, I don't give a shit about money even though I am very good of managing what I have and I don't waste time worrying about it, that's why money follows me around!
Just be sure that you are still paying that Franchise Tax to the City, even though you live in Maryland.
A few years back, the City duked it out with the hot dog vendors over this. The hot dog vendors, most of whom lived in Maryland, at the time (now most of them live in the Commonwealth of Virginia), tried to allege that it was a commuter tax. The City claimed that it was a business tax. The D.C. Superior Court agreed with the City (You used to be able to get justice there, but no more. The fix was put in under the administration of A. Williams.) The vendors appealed to a Federal Court (where you can get justice, still) and even the Federal Court agreed with the City.
You can get a direct credit against your Virginia taxes for the Franchise Tax payment. Maryland has some kind of screwy formula for figuring it. There is a form in both jurisdictions entitled 'Credit for Taxes Paid to Other States or Jurisdictions', or words similar. There is also an instruction sheet. In Maryland, it does not always work out as a direct credit.
I remember that guy's name, now. I will not post it here. I am not sure if he is still around here. He must have been from the North of Persia, as his family name was a 'Russianised' version of an Islamic name. His given name was an Islamic name.
The Russians had effective control of the Northern part of Persia from the nineteenth century until the early 1920s. The English controlled the South and there was a Neutral Zone in between the two. The English and the Soviets went back, between 1940 and 1946, as Persia became a back door to supply the Soviet war effort.
Anyhow, you do well to keep the pants zipped, literally and figuratively. You metioned a while back about the peepee jar. Every once in a while, the Diamond Office gets a call about some driver's supposedly 'exposing himself' or 'playing with himself' when what he is really doing is utilising the peepee jar. Diamond has been run off two radio stands, the MVC Gatehouse and the Porter, because drivers were relieving themselves in the woods, there. They said that you could smell the peepee on the Gatehouse stand. I never was much of a stand sitter, so I do not know. The McLean or AU, maybe, if I feel like reading the paper for a minute. Usually, a walkup quickly interrupts my reading, on those stands.
Looks like Phil never commented regarding becoming a DC driver.
I've talked to some VA drivers who own their own cars, but the fees they pay to the cab companies seem pretty high. What is it per week to use the Diamond name, or one of the other cab companies in dc?
I used to deliver pizza in college, and bullshit #1 and bullshit #3 also apply to pizza drivers. Bullshit #2 doesn't - hardly anyone thinks its good money. There were some situations where girls invited me in while delivering, some more expressly than others about their intentions but I'd never do it for three reasons:
1)I'm working to make money, time off the road is time not making money
2)I'd be scared of getting robbed (going into someone's house is almost always a no-no delivering pizza)
3)exactly what happened to the Persian dude Phil was talking about. I worked for a while at a Public Defenders' office and one of the most interesting/most fucked up cases we had was with a couple of middle eastern dudes who fucked a drunk college chick who later regretted it. I don't know why they didn't flee back to Yemen when they were out on bail and the Judge had yet to seize their passports (fuck, get the fuck out of here somehow w/o a passport), but now one of them will be spending some quality time in a prison for a while (the other was acquitted - which is another interesting story).
Michael
michael_3653@hotmail.com
Mike to use
1-Diamond Logo
2-Insurance
3-Dispatch Fee
is a total of $93/week.
can't beat that!
If you want to be just one of those street hustlers it's only $35/week.
P.S extra few bucks to bribe Phil so you can get all the lucrative jobs!
That is not funny, Mad Cabbie and I demand that you retract that comment about payola. I DO NOT TAKE PAYOLA, I HAVE NEVER TAKEN PAYOLA AND WILL NOT TAKE IT. I have a reputation for being honest. When I was Secretary of the Corporation I fired four dispatchers for corruption, including one of the legendary crooks. I even got sucker punched for firing one crooked dispatcher. I have my battle scars in the struggle for honesty in Diamond's radio room. No one else there has the scars that I do in trying to clean up that dump of crooked dispatchers or operators.
I fought Company Officers and Boards of Directors over getting rid of dishonest radio room employees. I even presented photographic proof to one President of the Company of an employee's and driver's dishonesty. The response was to fire me.
I have nothing to do with the management of that dump right now, so I have nothing to say about who does what, nor do I particullarly care who does what. I tried to stand up and everyone ran away and left me holding my crotch. More than a few of those lousy bastards would not have a face, still, had it not been for what I did for them. Some of those people working in the radio room would not be there, had it not been fro what I did for them. When I needed them, few of them were anywhere to be found. In fact, some of those who did speak up for me were guys who had every reason to hate me.
Despite that, I will still be honest when I am behind that microphone. I do not accept payola, nor would I ever. Anything that anyone has ever said about my accepting payola is a lie.
For now, all that I worry about is that I do right.
You are damned right that you hit a raw nerve. You have no right to make such a remark about me or to impugn my character in such fashion. It is not funny.
That is not funny, sir, and I demand that you retract that remark about bribing me.
93/wk def isn't bad. I talked to a blue top driver in Arlington and it cost him 173/wk just for the radio/to use btc logo (he owned his own car)+ 230/mnth for insurance (no collision). Wju would someone pay that much if Diamond is so much cheaper - how lucrative can Arlington be?
How hard is the learning curve on the radio? I'm pretty well versed in downtown DC but I just moved to the region a little over a yr and spend move of my time over in VA. I learn streets quickly though.
For the record, I'll believe Phil that he's honest and not waste any payola on him but rather on the other dispatchers.
Michael
and btw i think I live in the high rise phil mentioned with the Iranian cab drive near Green Valley on Glebe Rd.
Michael
I loved it that I pushed your button! About four years ago you pushed mine, that night I really had it and I was ready to be locked up by whipping your ass Phil. Thank God Robert had to calm me down when I run in to him at the Diamond lot. That night you accused me of being lazy when I asked you for a call out for a run in a shit hole in Anacostia. (A call nobody would touch!) I am one of the handful Diamond drivers who works in every corner of the District of Columbia, ask Robby Jones! Me and you had it that night for a good 15 minutes. I never took a single call from you ever since, you never appreciated the shit calls I used to run for you.
So this is the deal, you apologize for calling me lazy and then I will do my part, in the mean time you need to calm down and bang that pretty wife of yours.
You must have the wrong guy, because I would not refuse to call out a job in a nasty area of the City, especially at night. Safety of my drivers is FIRST, ESPECIALLY at night. I have tried to stress that to all of my trainees, but it has fallen on deaf ears. You can tell that from the calibre of some of the dispatchers up there, these days. I will not work with some of them.
I might have called someone else lazy who was screaming about a call out at the same time at a private home in Cleveland Park, but it would not have been you if you were on Dexter Place, Mapleview or something like that. In fact, if you do take a call in far Southeast or Northeast, I often keep checking on you just to make sure that you are allright. I will often call you in the middle of the job, ask where you are and tell me to call when you drop because I have a message. Ask Yusuf and a couple of others about that.
I do not remember anything about a fifteen minute shouting match on the air, either. I tend to remember those things, because I do not often go that long. I usually put you off the air and move on. If you use four letter words, an FCC violation, I definitely put you off the air and move on. It gets to the point where I just ignore someone who is yelling at me and work around him. Eventually, the disruptor shuts up. I am that good. It comes from years of experience and some very good teachers.
Four years past would have been 2005, and I was not on the microphone that much, then. It was 2006 when I started back on it, in earnest.
I would not refuse to call out a job that I was trying to get covered, assuming that I was begging to get it covered.
I do not appreciate those who run trashball calls, huh? I know who does and who did run the trashball calls, and I know where most of those guys are, now. I helped every one of them, when I could and even went into Bob Waller's office more than once over it because some crybaby prima donna had gone in there wailing to Bob over it. I told Bob that I gave so and so the call and not Mr. Fleet Lawyer because Mr. Hacker worked hard and ran the jobs without complaining and even volunteered for the trash while Mr. Lawyer did nothing but piss, moan and cry and expected me to do everything for him except collect the fare.
So if I 'apologise', you will 'do your part', huh? Give me mo-wah credit than thaht, this IS an old Yankee, aftah all. It appears that the scales tip more in my favour after that last post. Oh, and you know what you can do with that 'whip your ass' rhetoric. Too many people around there are always trying to break bad.
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