sadly it was a middle class lady in her late 30s who ran into her agreeable house pissed in the small hours.brandersnatch wrote: ↑Tue May 25, 2021 5:13 pm I’d love to have seen the miscreant’s face. Did he pay up straight away or did you call Evil Warren?
I did bang like fuck on the door back then but got no answer. Mindful of the fact that she's an ABC1 lady with a £300,000 house and plod may not automatically take my side in such a conflict, I rang the number on the job and it went through to the lady at the pick up address. I explained the situation to her and she promised to get her mate to ring the office to pay tomorrow. I gave the number to our accounts dept to chase up but heard nothing of it.
As you can imagine, I was positively 'beading' when I saw the address pop up on my screen. To my slight dismay, a man left the house and got in the back of my car. I hit the central locking and before pulling away I start innocently chatting about his wife and her friend at L**** ****n and he says that she's often getting drunk there. That's when I drop the bombshell of the fact she owes me a tenner after doing a runner into their house! He starts to get a bit defensive and says that I must have made a mistake. I ask him to phone his wife and get her to come out to see me. He agrees and phones her. He explains the situation to her over the phone. Now, I can only hear one half of the conversation, but his last line was "I'll give the driver £10 and we'll talk about this later?" He pays me my money and I take him to his destination.
The only other attempted non payer I've had in the last year was three girls in their early 20s who I picked up from a shit part of Liverpool (Wavertree) going to a shit part of Birkenhead. En route I belled Ian the operator wondering why this wasn't a cash up front job. He replied that she'd used us 250 times so far without a problem which was good enough for me. The journey went well enough with them being chatty and singing along to the radio so I thought all was well. When we arrive at the destination, and for reasons I can't explain why, I unlocked the doors before getting paid, and all three ran off down a short alleyway before splitting up.
FUCK! I call Ian at the office and as he knows both myself and Evil Warren he is reluctant to give me the address that's she's been picked up from a couple of hundred times, but offers me a solution. He says that although he's got an idea up his sleeve, I can have a Speke Airport take out in half an hour to compensate me. Fair enough.
I'm heading off to the airport pick up when my phone rings, it's Ian telling me to go to the junction of Duke St and Beckwith St to meet a young lady who's going to give me £20! Apparently, he blagged her by leaving a voicemail message to her saying that as she was a regular passenger he knew her address and had reported it to the police and they were on their way to question her! It worked and she shit herself and found my money.
When I met her she was incredibly sorry and blamed her mates for dropping her in it, and by the look on her face I was inclined to believe her. I gave her a short lecture about choosing her friends more wisely before going to do my airport run.