The Other Side of Midnight by Mike Heffernan Page B

expects that at the end of the night he’ll see a few more kilometres than I have money. With some brokers they want you to pay a dollar and a quarter a kilometre. If I got $400, I should have about 330 kilometres. That’s why when somebody asks if you can take them to Mount Pearl for $20 you take the $20. What the boss doesn’t know won’t hurt him. It’s called “cribbing,” working off the meter.
    One time, I didn’t have the right kilometres. The boss said, “You’re cribbing me!”
    I said, “What?”
    â€œYou don’t know what cribbing is?”
    He assumed I didn’t and went into great detail about how it’s robbing and how you go about doing it. He gave me about twenty ideas on how to do it. “Now that you know that I know,” he said, “you better not be at it.”
    But you do it according to the broker you drive for. There are some brokers that I won’t drive for because I’d make less money. I just got too much respect for them. I wouldn’t be able to do what I can do with another broker who might’ve pissed me off.
    Costing Regular Business
    Allen, driving for twenty-two years
    For years, while the taxi inspector was there, nobody shagged around. If you had to go see the taxi inspector, if somebody made a complaint about you, he’d sit you down, and it made you pretty nervous. People had a lot of respect for him—a little bit of fear and a lot of respect—because he kept you on your toes.
    The last time the city had a full-time taxi inspector down there was probably in the early ‘90s. He was doing a good job, too. He’d be down there on a Friday night looking for cars with defects, cars that didn’t have working lights and proper stickers. Stuff like that. Sometimes these big stand owners have cars floating around without proper stickers on them. The stand owner might have an extra car and an extra driver. They just stick a radio in a car and send them out. It’s not legal, but the stand owner might say, “Go on and take it. Make an extra couple bucks for the weekend.” The taxi inspector had the power to stop that sort of stuff. He’d stand up on the corner of Adelaide Street and George Street and haul people off the road. If you got too many people in your car, he’d go over and issue a citation. A lot of that is on the go. There might be six or seven students heading home from downtown that’ll pile up in the car: “We’ll give you two bucks each to take us to the university.” But you’re not supposed to take any more than four or five passengers. If you have an accident, you’re not insured. The insurance won’t cover you because you got too many people in the car.
    There are a lot of junkers out there, too. They’re only inspected by City Hall once a year. That inspection is pretty perfunctory. All they do is check the signal lights, headlights, and backup lights. They check to see if your doors open. They don’t take it off the road and lift it up on the ramp.
    The taxi inspector was there to prevent things like that from happening. These days, if the city needs someone to do something like an inspection someone comes over from Housing.
    It seemed like we had a little bit more legitimacy when there was a taxi inspector. You had somebody to answer to. Now it’s like any fool can drive a taxi. We got guys coming from Ontario and British Columbia thinking there’s this big job market here and then they can’t find anything. What do they do? They go drive a taxi. They’re out there driving and they don’t know where they’re going. It’s costing us regular business. The funniest one I ever heard was when I was working at Gulliver’s. The taxi stand is on Adelaide Street, right in front of City Hall. The dispatcher called out, “Car such and such head over to the front of City Hall.”
    Buddy radios back: