waiting for a taxi

I’m so cold I can barely type, so annoyed I can barely think without swearing and so far from home I can barely understand the accents around me.

Today I’m in Cambridge having meetings with some colleagues. As an Oxfordshire resident I’m naturally against the whole concept of Cambridge and usually deny its existence. But today I’ve had to bite the bullet and get on the long train ride to this non existent land that time forgot.

As with Oxford, Cambridge has tried so hard to hang on to its heritage that the modernised parts stick out like sore thumbs and generally compete with the city instead of complementing it. Having said that, it’s ok, and there are some very nice parts if you can put up with intelligent, posh students acting like complete idiots in order to be cool. Actually I could be talking about either city there so delete as necessary depending on your loyalty.

Any way, at the end of the day I ordered a taxi to get me to the station and began closing down my laptop. “Ten minutes,” came the cheery response from the controller. So I had a last cup of tea and visit to the toilet whilst saying my goodbyes to everyone. Actually, having re read that last sentence I should point out that I wasn’t going to the toilet whilst saying the goodbyes, I had the good grace to wait until afterwards.

What I did then was very, very foolish. My naivety completely caught me by surprise. As the building is a big one and the taxi drivers don’t bother coming in I headed out to wait. Am I really so inexperienced in life to believe the 10 minute taxi time? Really – have I never travelled anywhere?

Bang on 10 minutes after ordering the car I stood outside smiling. Any minute now the cab would come round the corner to get me. As we all know, or should know in my case, taxis are always 10 minutes away. The time is never meant to relate to an actual measured length of your lifespan. It is merely supposed to be an indication to let you know that they have received your order. There is no fixed measure for how long a taxi driver’s 10 minutes actually is. I believe this is the theory that Albert Einstein was actually working on when he stumbled accidentally on the whole E=MC squared thing. Albert never did find the answer and finally died whilst stood in his lounge looking out of the window for the cab that had been “just coming into your road now” for the last hour.

As the minutes ticked by I started to realise how cold it was and so I began to do the walk of ‘waiting passenger’. I walked around in an ever increasing spiral for a few minutes, turned and then walked back into the start. Then I walked on each paving slab without ever standing on the cracks or standing on the same one twice. There are 56 paving slabs in the little patio area outside the office, you will no doubt be interested to hear!

I was really cold by this point as was clear by the way my buttocks were beginning to go numb as the cold worked its way through my inadequate layers. To raise morale I began singing the waiting for a taxi song, a simple refrain that starts off simply by repeating “Where is the taxi?” but then turns a little Tarantino so I won’t go into detail about the later verses here and the chorus would make Eddie Murphy wince so I’ll leave it there.

For a full 40 minutes I pranced about finding different ways to walk over the slabs and adding new and physically impossible verses to the song. Finally the cab turned up with a smiling driver instantly opening with, “It’s like a maze here ‘innit mate? Been drivin’ roun’ for chuffin’ ages!”

“Yes it is like a maze, a particularly rubbish one with a really big building sat on its own surrounded my road signs pointing to it!” I coolly responded.

And so here I am on the train at last; the lateness of the taxi making me miss two trains. Now I have to head all the way into London before I can turn round and head back out to Oxford. It’s a long trip but happily I don’t have to do it too often so I suppose I shouldn’t moan.

T=DW divided by Q squared – I think I just solved it.

T = Ten minutes

D= Drivers ability to know where he is in relation to the little one bar heater in the cab office.

W = Time it takes to finish ‘reading’ Playboy.

Q = Quality of the fare. The journey you are taking will affect how much money can be made for the shortest possible driving time. Also factored in is if you are being picked up from a good tipping area or if you are likely to have some extra chargeable luggage in the boot. 2 seconds after hearing where you are going from and to, the cabbie will be able to come up with a figure between one and 10 that relates to your Q score.

How hard was that Einstein?