blacklisted:

I did not actually ride with the first one as he refused to drive Downtown because “it only makes 17LE on the meter.” The advantage of this situation for me is that his own stupidity, which he will have to live with for the rest of his life, is punishment enough for what happened right there.

The second one deliberately chose the slow lanes of traffic while a road was backed up from an accident, probably to make the price on the meter go up. Being stuck in traffic caused me to miss the work bus I was trying to catch at 7:20. At some point he noted that “it is only 7:00,” as if to imply that there is still time and it will be okay. He did not yet actually know that I was catching a bus at 7:20 until after he made this statement, so I really don’t know what “it is only 7:00” was supposed to mean. But I could have strangled him and no one would have known.

Third guy was to take me from Downtown to my work since the work bus was long gone by that time. He didn’t like the fact that we were going somewhere far away, yet he agreed to drive there. He kept asking “Are we there yet? Are we there yet?” and then when we were almost there, he pulled the taxi over on the side of the road so that he could walk off into the desert somewhere and take a piss. I work far away from Downtown, but I don’t work that far away from Downtown. It’s a commute, it’s not a road trip across the country with no rest stops. He also took a really long piss. An abnormally long piss. A piss so long I considered suggesting to him that he have his prostate checked for “complications.” When he was finished, he strolled back to the taxi with a we-have-all-day gait. When he re-entered the taxi, my eyes became microscopes and I was suddenly able to see bacteria crawling all over the seats and the gear shift and the doorknobs and his money.  Then he mumbled about how difficult and exhausting this odyssey was, which, you know, I was really able to sympathize with when I have made this back-and-forth journey approximately 350 times and he had to do so once and get overpaid for it. The guy has a point, after all, what with the lack of toilets along the way past megamalls, chain restaurants, gas stations, coffee shops, residential areas and hotels, today’s intolerable 24°C/75°F Cairo weather, the clamor of passengers dozing in the backseat, and their unrealistic demands of arriving at the destination to which he agreed to go.