In the Cellphone Zone, Cabbies and Passengers Drive Each Other Crazy
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Sunday, April 13, 2008
" I think it's a party line," says Michael Levin. "One big party line and they're all talking to each other."
"I always assume they're talking about me," says Levin's friend Laura Silberman. "It's usually in a foreign language . . . but I assume they're saying, 'Ugh, this annoying girl just got in and now I need to --' "
"But what I want to know," says Silberman's husband, Reuben, "is how you can talk to anyone that long. Anyone. If you figure my ride is representative of the day -- for that long."
Levin and the Silbermans, sharing a table at the Wonderland bar in Washington, are talking about cabdrivers.
And on the other side of the therapist's couch:
"If the customer is rude or if I'm talking to my young son," says cabdriver Tekle Atsku, "I'm not going to get off the phone. I'm not."
"We're not the only ones" on our cells, says driver Birhanu Gizaw. "Sometimes passengers, they don't even stop talking to tell me where to go. They get annoyed that I'm not going but they don't tell me where to go."
Can this marriage be saved?
The transition from zones to meters -- scheduled for May 1 -- has prompted strikes and editorials, but it seems positively orderly compared with the the trouble cabby and passenger have communicating with each other, their attempts bouncing around between native tongue and English, cellphone and BlackBerry. They are jabbering away at people they already know, often ignoring each other.
Cabbies, with their Bluetooth implants and those thumb-twiddling hours spent in traffic with nothing else to do, seem to be the worst offenders.
"Are they talking to their kids?" speculates federal investigator Jeff Weinstein. "Or maybe they're talking to other people about their kids? Trading parenting tips?"
Even professional travelers have noticed: "Oh, they're like automatons," says Peter Greenberg, travel correspondent for the "Today" show, who has ridden in taxis in more than 40 states. "I've been from my house [in Manhattan] all the way to JFK with the driver talking the whole time."
