I'm a lawyer. I'm a mid-level associate in a fairly big law firm. That means I often work late into the evening. When we work late we are permitted to take a cab home, on the firm's (or the client's) dime.
As a result, I have had many interesting conversations with taxi drivers. Late at night they are often very friendly and talkative, and I have learned a lot about the taxi business, about the interesting lives they led prior to becoming Boston cab drivers, and the countries they come from.
One of my favorite cab drivers is a very sweet gentleman from Hyderabad who calls me "madam" (even though I've asked him to use my name). He told me he was the last member of his immediate family to leave India for the United States. He was managing all the family's properties in Hyderabad until they prevailed upon him to join them here. He sold off all the properties and left his life behind to come and drive a cab in Boston. He never stops looking for opportunities, though. Once, I did not see him for a while, and he told me he had traveled to Minnesota to inspect a gas station he was thinking about buying.
Another cab driver, a Russian fellow, educated me about how hard one has to work to make a living as an honest hack. He said if you drive 40 hours a week, you just about cover your costs. If you drive 80 hours a week, you make a good living. He also told me that he knows a driver who bribes dispatchers to send the most lucrative jobs his way. The cab company he drives for just got a new, computerized system that uses GPS to automatically assign jobs to the closest driver. The only driver complaining about the system is the one who used to bribe the dispatcher - everyone else likes it.
Of course, this being Boston, drivers love to chat with me about the Big Dig, especially when I leave work late enough that the spectacular, multi-billion dollar is closed for the night so that crews can work on fixing all the hundreds of leaks that have sprung in its walls. One driver was formerly a civil engineer in South Africa and was full of theories of why the project went wrong and how it could have been done better. He also told me a fascinating story about working on a tunnel system of his own and modeling it in his garage.
My driver the other night told me that his father runs the biggest and most successful construction company on the Arabian peninsula. (For those of you keeping score at home, that would probably be Bin Laden Construction, but I did not ask for confirmation!) He told me his father had visited Boston and was disgusted by the mismanagement of the Big Dig. This driver suffered from what you might call "in my country-itis." Public works, traffic, the police, everything he could think of to talk about were all superior "in my country." His tales were amusing but I sensed a common thread of hyperbole throughout. He told me that the police "in my country" would not be caught dead eating donuts or going to a takeaway restaurant on the job. He told me that there are supervisory police who watch the police, and if a police officer went into a restaurant during his shift he would be stripped of his badge before he finished his meal.
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