By Monica Hesse
Washington Post Staff Writer
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."
Everyone agrees it is awkward, no one can articulate why: "It does seem a bit rude?" passenger Andrew Battye ventures cautiously. "Because the customer is supposed to be the center of attention? And you might need to tell him where to go? But he's on his mobile?" Battye and his wife, Elizabeth, are visiting Washington from London. They also spent a weekend in New York, meekly trying to interrupt drivers long enough to announce that their hotel was two blocks ago.
Perhaps it boils down to an etiquette problem. Butting in on someone else's discussion should be done under only dire circumstances. Is an acceptable interruption . . . when you know of road construction ahead? When you speak Amharic and you feel you have something to add to the front-seat conversation?
What, exactly, does a cabdriver owe his passenger? Safe transport from A to B, or sparkling dialogue on the way? At UDC's Taxicab Drivers Program, 60 hours of coursework mandated for anyone interested in obtaining a hack license, cellphones are mentioned only in the context of safety: Instructor Johnny McCain encourages his drivers to pull over to the side of the road to conduct any conversations.
Um. Is McCain willing to admit that perhaps this pulling over does not always happen?
"Oh, yeah," he says. But then, he says, the cellphone is really important to the cabdriver's business. It's how he builds a regular clientele, gets directions to unfamiliar destinations. It shouldn't be at the expense of the customer, says McCain. "I always say the customer is always right even when he's as wrong as two left feet."
The thing is, there are some situations in which technology has already superseded human interaction. Metro riders jacked into their iPods, airplane seatmates watching rental movies on laptops -- we have accepted these as settings devoid of conversation; we no longer try to talk about the weather. We bury our noses in SkyMall and then deplane without so much as a "Whereya heading to?"
This could be the new status quo with cabs. But it's not yet, not quite, which is what makes the etiquette so nebulous.
* * *
Michael Gebru is a talker. Parked in the cab line outside of the downtown Hyatt, he buzzes cheerfully on his hands-free device, but hangs up when a reporter knocks on his window.
"That was my wife," he explains. But most of the time if he's on the phone he's talking shop, running a used-car business out of the front seat of his sedan.
"I get calls from Georgia, from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, from Nationwide insurance, sometimes 10 or 12 an hour." Gebru, who has tiny spectacles and a neat mustache, gestures to a groaning briefcase and to the cup holder filled with highlighters and paper clips. "This is my small office."
But what was it like, Mr. Gebru, before cellphones, when the only people that a cabbie and a customer could talk to were . . . each other?
Oh, it was very boring, he says. Very boring. He can remember those days well; he's been driving since 1989. Lots of waiting, nothing to do on days when passengers trickled.
Then again, when passengers did get in his car, they would talk about politics, or the economy, or his native country of Ethiopia. He had some good conversations -- some bad ones, but some good ones, too.
It's silly, he says. "But I do miss it sometimes."
James Katz studies why this might be so. Katz is the director of the Center for Mobile Communication Studies at Rutgers University. Founded in 2004, CMCS researches the social and psychological ramifications of the cellphone explosion.
"It used to be that when people came to a new town they would use the cabdriver to learn what was what, to get a cracker-barrel philosophy of the town," Katz says. Cabbies acted as information pollinators, steering people away from the Hard Rock Cafe and toward the unknown holes in the wall. "It's been part of our cultural tradition and initiation, and it's disappearing."
Disappearing Americana, mobile cultural exchanges . . . Why must we wax nostalgic about everything, including those miserable crosstown jaunts in which the driver would expound on everything from the Bush family to his bunions? And for drivers -- why talk to a stranger when you can talk to your spouse, or sell a used car or two?
For Greenberg, the "Today" correspondent, the benefits of cab talk have been tangible. He began a decade-old friendship in one after enjoying a ride with driver William Magella so much that he requested his taxi every time he was in New York. "For the next eight years he drove me, he drove my friends, he drove my mother, my mother started buying him new shirts," Greenberg says. One day Magella, originally from Egypt, invited Greenberg to the overseas wedding of his cousin Billy, who had occasionally driven Magella's cab.
"In New York, Billy is a cabdriver," Greenberg says. "In Egypt he's a god."
The wedding took place in the old palace of King Farouk, an all-night affair with 500 Egyptian guests "and one New Yorker having the time of his life."
For drivers, the benefits can be tangible, too.
"If you talk a lot, they tip a lot," says Chester Wooten, who has driven a cab in the District for 36 years. Wooten is the type of driver who has cabology down to a science, who knows that the radio must be turned down to a low hum, that the plastic mats on the floor of the back seat must be freshly scrubbed. People think drivers can predict tips just by looking at a potential fare, he says, but that's not true. A little tipper can become a big tipper in the course of one ride. "It's about the conversation," says Wooten, about the whole experience of the trip.
On a gray Tuesday morning Wooten cruises the streets near Union Station, where a line of tired-looking travelers hold their luggage and wait for cabs. Out of the five drivers at the front of the taxi line, three are talking on their phones. Out of the five potential passengers at the front of the line, four are talking on theirs.
But in midst of this lack of human interaction, a ray of hope: Leon Swain, chairman of the District's Taxicab Commission, reports that the next version of the cab rider's bill of rights will include an amendment related to cellphones.
He's coy on specifics.
But cabbies and passengers will probably be awarded the right to talk to each other.
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