1. Worst-Ever-Taxi-Ride
Before diving-into the details of my worst-ever-taxi-ride I first have to explain my selection criteria. Unlike a “best-ever” experience which relies on the best, fun-filled memories to share, a “worst-ever” experience should not be a simple mirror-image as who really wants to be weighed-down by genuinely distressing and shitty situations? Instead, there should be some redeeming memories and features to make it palatable, such as a slice of humour, a surprise twist-or-two, etc. This story ticks-those-boxes.
Taxi-rides are central a central part of the IT consulting experience, especially if you chose not to drive. Every-day you need to get to-and-from the client’s site which will typically be located in a different city, and most probably country, to where you live. Following the math to get a “handle” on numbers takes you to an average of two-taxis per day, for an average forty-weeks per year in a forty-year career, which comes to a colossal sixteen-thousand taxi-rides in total. So, it is unsurprising for a small percentage of rides that things can go wrong “horribly” wrong.
Things that have happened to me include the driver being high on class-A drugs, running-out of fuel and asking me to loan them the cost to re-fill the tank, getting totally lost which was a lot easier in the days before SatNavs, arriving at a town or city with a similar sounding name, being involved in minor traffic accidents on the way, the driver insisting on talking all the way, etc. I even had one trip where the driver, a happy Geordie ex-fireman, insisted I know in distressing detail the best way to cut people free after motorway smashes, while reassuring them that although he was prevented for medical reasons from giving them any remotely useful like painkillers, or anything at all, but that they should feel free to “scream as much as you like, but don’t worry, it doesn’t put-me-off”, then cheerfully continue with his work!
Once I even had a driver in Jakarta with whom I had travelled fifty kilometres before I determined that his perfect “Yes” in English (e.g. do you know where Daan Mogot is? – “Yes”, are we nearly there? – “Yes”, do you know this address – “Yes”, etc.), was in fact his entire knowledge of English; just the one word of “Yes”! So, similar to a personalized “bucket” list (e.g. riding the metro in Moscow, swimming with the Irukandji jelly-fish off Australia’s Great-Barrier-Reef, etc.), I have been forced to create a personalized “first-against-the-wall-come-the-revolution” list, and taxi-drivers are right-up-there near the top.
So, against this impressive backdrop of woe, the “worst-ever-taxi-ride” story that meets my selection criteria was not technically a taxi-ride at all, though it does have strong resonances with one. I was in Jeddah in Saudi for a two-week business-trip in the early 1990’s after already completing a similar two weeks in the UAE. I had not been in the region before, and I was exhausted. This was due to a number of factors, the main one being just keeping-up with the workload the (well-paid and lightly-taxed) ex-pats put-in, twelve hours a day, six days a week, forty-eight weeks in the year. Another factor was the strange hours office they kept; eight to twelve, followed by four hours off, optionally at home, then four to midnight back working! Jetlag was another factor, as was the cumulative effects of hotel-based alcohol “over-indulgence” of the previous two-weeks.
Now being in dry-Saudi rather than the UAE the alcohol-tap had been severed. On my first evening I went through the hotel-mini-bar; alcohol-free lager, alcohol-free white-wine, and even alcohol-free Champaigne. I felt like crying. I had heard about all the wild illegal parties, but if they even existed, I was never invited to one. I did “miss-a-trick” though; on my regular midnight walks through the markets such as the spice-souk and gold-souk, I kept coming across one next to the corniche that seemed to sell nothing but asparagus! With 20-20 hindsight of-course it wasn’t asparagus, it was khat! I could have so easily chewed-my-way to becoming a consulting “dervish” for two weeks; super-alert, super-motivated, on virtual automatic and in the vernacular as “wired” as a telegram (but when in Rome…)!
Years later I read one of those astonishing facts that totally fitted-in with the above, and the speed-loving residents of the gulf region in general (where do you think coffee originated?). It was from the FT (Financial-Times) which announced the annual league-tables of drug abuse by category across the world. There, leading the pack by far in the amphetamine section was Saudi Arabia, and it suddenly all made sense. The speed-of-choice was in pill-form, a little pick-me-up from the local supplier to help you get through your annual ex-pat contract. That explained why petrol-station staff would rush-out to your car in the midday sun, smiling away as they polished your wipers, windscreen and lights, why construction workers would weld-away in the midday sun, etc. Imagine that magnified across all the employments sectors; a large percent of the imported workforce were off-their-heads, all the time!
Anyway, it was approximately 19.00 in the office, and the boss popped-in to say there was a change-of-plan, and he couldn’t drop me off at the hotel as he had to pay a bribe. Apparently, this is normally done via one-off consulting fees that mysteriously wash-away all those bureaucratic obstacles that had been holding-up your projects, but this time it was cash. Twenty thousand dollars, delivered in a back-street meet-up. I asked “aren’t you a little worried?” to which the boss replied “only if I give it to the wrong person!”.
So, I needed a taxi. The boss’s stand-in took charge. Roger was much younger than the boss and was making his way up the organization very quickly. He had his own, more direct way of running things. No-one “jibbed-off” half-way through a shift without sanction when he was in charge, regardless if they were from head-office or not. Accompanies by the faintest of smiles his words were “no need for a taxi, I’ll get Ali to drive you to your hotel”. He then added, “in fact, I insist, this way”.
I followed him into a side office where a middle-aged man was sitting behind a desk with masses of papers strewn across it. He looked up, immediately got to his feet and in the strongest of ex-pat accents from the subcontinent said “Mr Roger, Mr Roger, what can I do for you?” to which the reply came “can you drive Mr Andrew back to his hotel, and be as quick as you can”. Ali was away; “Mr Andrew, Mr Andrew, I take you to my car, we drive to Jeddah, I like working here, how long are you here for, etc.”. Apart from his continuous verbal stream-of-consciousness there was one obvious feature about Ali; he was wearing pebble glasses, very similar to those that Ghandi wore, but much, much thicker.
I followed him out of the building and into the yard where his somewhat beat-up car was parked-up, straddling two bays. In we jumped, and of course, my seat belt didn’t work. Ali: “Mr Andrew, it’s OK, it’s OK, Saudi roads very good”, and we set off. It was only a short drive to the desert motorway that would take us back the thirty kilometres into Jedah. The office was co-located with the depot which explains why we were we were so far-out of town. I had joined a construction company to escape an IT consultancy I had been too complacent at. It was only when the consultancy distributed a document to everyone with a section entitled “managing a plateaued career” that I realized I had to get out quickly, and the construction company was my “get-out-of-jail-free” card.
There was some road-works, but almost no traffic. First a roundabout, then we pulled onto a small section of dual carriageway. Something didn’t feel quite right, but I dismissed my qualms. It was only when we were half way down the five-hundred-meter stretch that I realised what was amiss; we were travelling on the wrong side of the dual carriageway, and a truck was coming straight for us. No problem for Ali though, a quick shimmy to the right and we passed it safely. An adrenalin rush then temporarily incapacitated both my legs, followed by Ali shouting “truck drivers very bad, very bad”. Fear made me incapable of saying anything, but Ali wasn’t afraid. With a big smile he followed-up with “Mr Andrew, I get you to Jedah very quickly, Ali drives very quickly”.
We got to the end of the section before anything else came at us. Another roundabout, and this time we exited correctly onto the desert motorway to Jedah. The reality of desert roads can be very different to one’s expectations, and in Saudi this was definitely the case at that time. First the desert; it was a rock desert with a little sand drifting everywhere in the winds. The big observation though is that to both sides of the carriageway were continuous ribbon-mounds of plastic rubbish, rising to about a meter high and three meters wide. Over the years plastic thrown-out from cars and trucks would settle and build-up parallel to the motorways. Obviously, nothing and nobody removed it.
Then the tyre marks! Every few kilometres you could see tyre marks on the road surface as a truck or car had veered-off the road. Occasionally you could still see the burnt-out debris left behind to the side. As Ali sped-up we passed the speed limit. This is marked by each car having a hard-wired beeper that activates when this limit is breached. On or just over the limit you hear a dull beep every five seconds or so to remind you that you are going too fast. For Ali it was just the starting-gun.
As our speed increased the beep became louder and louder and the gap between beeps reduced until it reached a continuous screech as we topped-out at one hundred-and-seventy-five kilometres per hour. At this speed the limited aero-dynamics of Ali’s car became apparent as we would every now-and-then just jump a meter to the left or right as it became temporarily airborne due to wind gusts. I was already terrified, and darkness was not far away. Thank goodness we were almost alone on the road. However, traffic was not our biggest worry. The big three threats on these roads were sand, goats, but particularly camels. Sand would sometimes collect on the side of the road pavement to a depth of five or ten centimetres. If you hit that at speed you would be off the road.
Goats and camels were even more of a danger. The Bedouin herded these and they had scant regard for the rules of 20th century roads. Their way of crossing the motorway was just to cross it wherever they could, whenever they wanted. There were no flashing-light “Camel Crossing” signs or anything like that, you would just see a train of them, hopefully in the distance so you could slow down and stop for them.
The reality was much more “nail-biting”, of first seeing the camels, then brakes full-on, and finally screeching to a halt just meters away from them. This could be repeated several times in an hour’s journey. It was so common the ex-pats believed it was done intentionally by the Bedouin as each camel killed would earn them five thousand dollars, and if the camel concerned was a specialist racing camel as they mysteriously all turned-out to be, twenty thousand, all picked-up by the insurance; everyone happy!
Thankfully we had just the single camel stop before darkness fell. With the signs saying ten kilometres to go we were almost there. Ali though had one last experience to leave me with; the railway tracks. I discovered later there was a disused railway line still running across the motorway. One would expect to slow-down at the warning signs and cross at a sensible speed. Not for Ali though as he exclaimed “Mr Andrew, you have to take these fast and let the suspension do the work!”. I’m not sure how much suspension Ali’s beat-up old car still had until we launched, rally-style into the air. As we flew through the air, I just accepted that I was going to die, and I felt a sense of serenity flowing over me as time slowed-down. Then “bang” as we hit the ground, pointing at a slight angle. Like a formula-1 driver Ali flicked the steering-wheel to compensate, and we were back. Absolutely terrifying, but not for Ali as he complemented his driving-skills with the words “good fight Mr Andrew, good flight!”.
Well, that was it really. I was dropped-off at the hotel by a beaming Ali. You couldn’t meet a nicer man, or a worse driver (seriously-dangerous), but I had survived to consult another day! In the morning the office under-boss dropped-by to enquire “how was your ride?”, by which time, of course, I had determined his motivation. With a straight face I replied “fantastic, very relaxing”. We now understood each-other, honours were even, and I had passed my initiation!