Cabbies are interesting folks...

So I was in a cab coming home from working at a concert at the Echo Arena here in Liverpool, which is a great venue should you decide to google it. I’d positioned myself safely in the backseat and had relayed the directions to the cabbie. Then, I asked him “if he’d had a busy night”, you know, as you do. Funnily enough, he took offense to this and proceeded to scolded us for quoting a British comedian’s stand up routine on the topic of cab drivers. The comics name is Peter Kay, who is quite funny should you decide to youtube him. We claimed innocence as we were Canadian and did honestly not mean to cruelly quote this line for the umpteenth time that night.

Anyways, this cab driver (God know how he became one) has had quite an eventful life from what I could deduce; at one point he was a social science professor, he has published a paper comparing the state of poverty in England and the US, has sold cars in Houston, learnt Welsh while working in Wales and has been to eight African countries while they were in the middle of a military coup, once even surviving the bombing of an airport in the Ivory Coast while he was landing!

He was nice enough for a cabbie and had some insight on what exactly, according to him, sets British people apart from Americans (this seems to be a contentious issue for Brits). He recounted a tale of when he lived in Houston, you know, where he sold cars and such. He was at his local English pub hangout, chatting to his English friends and eating his steak pie and English ale, when an American conference goer popped his head in. After having forced the rest of his Big Mac bloated body through the hole in the wall (commonly referred to as a doorway), the American attempted to make conversation with said cab driver.

Now the American began to go on and on about the might of the American people and their superiority to British people. It may be important to mention at this point, that the English cab driver we speak of was a black man in Houston. Thus, this conversation carried on until our conniving cabbie placed a wager on the table to disprove his counterparts conjecture. Having sold a car earlier that day, he had about 10 000$ dollars in his pocket, as you usually have after selling a car in Houston (do you? Cause I don’t actually know? Just go along with it for the sake of the story…). So he proceeded to bet the American and his buddies that in one word, he could sum up why Great Britannia was better and that they would not even be able to give a definition for this word.

Well this sounded jolly good to the Yanks, being the epitome of intelligent beings that they are, and took him up on this offer. Well the cabbie went laughing all the way to the bank because in true Machiavellian style, he threw them a curve ball. Altruism was the word, meaning a tendency to feel the need of doing good and charitable deeds, the opposite of egoism as it were. The first Yank looked to the next, who looked to the Texan and then back. Pondering the word they doubted if it truly was one of Websters own and finally concluded that they’d been had.

Anyways, the moral of the story is this: if you’ve ever recently sold a car in Houston for 10 000$ profit, have studied the social background of your home country and the States and have found a Texan you believe you can dupe, then pick up your things, leave town, learn welsh and become a cabbie in Liverpool.

Le Grand Duc
Whew-Whew