Claim's Cabbies Corner. Kill crazy rampage imminent.

[Warren t claim]

Sadly, by far and away the worst people to work the mic are failed drivers!

[Eddie Honda]

Sadly, by far and away the worst people to work the mic are failed drivers!

Ditto courier companies.

[mercrocker]

Same in the docks....I worked the control room there for a decade or so. The quickest ones to break weren't the flightly little girls from the office who fancied doing shiftwork but walking-wounded dockers brought in from outside to keep them employed.

[Warren t claim]

Back in the days of taxis using a radio despatch system, it was never a good idea to get on the wrong side of the operator.
In those days a driver could find himself spending the night being bounced between various phone boxes to pick up passengers that mysteriously aren't there when he turns up. One operator called Sean, who's now a driver, took his revenge on a driver one step further. Sean sent out the whinging driver to a phoney job and told the driver to go around the back of the pick up address and knock on the back door, itself not that unusual back in those pre callback days. Once the "job" was sent Sean immediately phoned the police to report someone in that road stealing underwear off clothes lines! As you can imagine that driver had a lot of explaining to do when collared by Merseyside Police! Funnily enough, that driver never whinged again...

[Warren t claim]

Although there's a lot to be said for an automated despatch system that sends jobs out automatically to the nearest driver, for example, I can now have my car radio on at a decent volume, I do sometimes miss the banter over the air.

Blagging a helium balloon from a party and shouting in with a squeaky voice never got old. Spending a quiet midweek night shift less boring by seeing how much American trucker CB slang we could get away with. Other classics were "can whoever's listening to The Stereophonics please stop sitting on your mic, you're blocking the channel" and the Saturday night 2am classic of "does anyone have any spare LHM fluid to help another driver?" This was quite a regular shout out back in the early 2000s when the BX and Xantia were common private hire cars.

One drawback of a voice system was the practice of "longbonneting," this is where a greedy driver would pretend to be nearer a job that the oppo had shouted out than he actually was. Quite often I'd hear a job being given to another driver I saw heading the other way a few minutes earlier despite me being the closer car to the job. This even went on with data systems until we all got meters fitted to our dataheads meaning we couldn't pretend to have dropped off a passenger when they were still in the car.

Now this is before my time but I thought I'd mention it here anyway. Back in the 70s taxi radios weren't the two-way, CB like things you remember. What a driver had was a small head unit screwed to the dash with the rest of the radio fitted in the boot. To add insult to injury once fitted the driver also had to take his car to a specialist to get the system tuned into that firms radio frequency using crystals! Apparently the drain on the car electrics whenever the mic was keyed meant that ditching the dynamo in your Corsair or Zephyr for an alternator was an essential upgrade.

[Eddie Honda]

One drawback of a voice system was the practice of "longbonneting,"

We had a driver like that. He was known as FCB, aye FAT CHEATIN' BASTARD.

Often, it wasn't even subtle and quite easy for the controller to suss that his bonnet was the length of several E-types.

[brandersnatch]

It’s called false calling in the courier world. Frowned upon by the couriers and companies. I’ve known a couple of riders getting sacked over it.
One time I was standing by in Dean St Soho. I was working for a company that did plot controlling so I was waiting for a job. I was chatting to a rider from Addison Lee who were at the time an open call company.
For those of you who don’t know open call is a system where the controller calls out the street names of where the jobs are and the riders call in where they are and the closest gets the job. Loads of potential for dishonesty.
Anyway the AL controller calls Dean St. The bloke I was talking to called for the job but was beaten to it by another rider. He was seething. Told me this other guy was always false calling and he’d had enough of him.
A few minutes later the false caller turned up. As he was taking his helmet off the first rider started laying into him. Full on fists and boots. I thought he was going to kill him.
After giving him a proper pasting the first bloke stopped shy of kicking him in the head while he was on the floor and left it at that. The false caller was sitting on the kerb trying to stop his nose from bleeding.
First bloke then calmly leaned against his CX500 and carried on the conversation with me.
Not sure if the parcel ever got picked up.

[Warren t claim]

Although it's been a while since we've had a taxi driver murdered in my area I keep getting these nagging concerns as to whether I'm driving to my death when en route to a job.

[Warren t claim]

I was chatting to the owner of the taxi dealers who supplied my Hyundai the other day. I was enquiring about the take up of the full electric MG5EV locally and he said that he's waiting for Wirral Borough Council to get bac to work to approve it. This surprised me as I thought our local regs were simply 4 door, 4 wheels and at least 45" inches between the rear door handles. Apparently, WBC, being ever concerned about the image of the borough, changed the regs a few years back to block one particular car from being plated.

A virtual pint for whoever guesses what car my council didn't want used as a taxi.

[DodgeRover]

Chrysler 300?