Taxi Tales 6

A Patient from hospital

Could not remember which day or when. Picked him up from SGH going back home to Seng Kang, a middle age man who looks to be lost in his thoughts, on the way, heard the piss sound of opening a can drink. He drinks it down while I smell beer.

"Are you drinking beer? It is not allow in the taxi" I asked.

"I was just told I have a terminal cancer. If I do not drink now, not sure when I can have another drink. I may be gone tomorrow." He replied.

I kept my mouth shut through out the whole journey in my thoughts. I hope it will not happen to me, but we all have to meet our maker one day. May my faith keep me strong.



Taxi Booking Apps

What do I use? In my personal experience, GRABTAXI provides me with the most job opportunity. If you are at the new towns in the morning, CBD in the evening, there will be more then enough jobs than you can handle.

note: I have HAILO and EASITAXI install too. Unless I have 3 phones with 3 data plans, I can only run one app at a time. Have tried all 3 apps on various days, GRAB is the best.

But you got to be in the right place at the right time, meaning if you took a job at the MRT train station taxi stand, you better be only a minute or two away. If you arrived 5 minutes later, you job could be cancelled and your passenger driven away by another taxi that happens to comes by. The same applies to shopping center taxi stands ( I had customer cancel my job half the time).

Chances are those passenger booked taxi at a a far corner of the town where the pick up is under a HDB block. They will still be there when you turn out 5 minutes later (we do need time to travel there, you know?)

To me, taxi booking apps levels the playing ground between those driving Comfort Delgro and we others (PRIME, PRIMER, TRANSCAB) in taxi booking opportunities. Before the apps, all I do is street jobs, hardly any booking calls from Silver Taxi booking MDT.

Anyway, it helps passenger as well because they can in one click of a button, reach out to all 4 local taxi companies rather than calling their call center one at the time. Thus higher chance of getting a taxi.