“We need you to pick up some people at 1800. Possibly drive them to work at 0900 in the morning as well. Just for a couple of days. You will get to drive a Kia Picanto and you would do us a great favor!”
Sounds lovely doesn’t it? Who would say no to that? Well, not me! :-)

And although probably not the most challenging job in the world, fun it was for sure! The fun already started when picking out my temporary car. Besides the Kia Picanto there was a slightly better car available, this one with power steering, a Opel Agila… Oi… that’s a real difficult choice! The bad or the ugly. As the challenge seemed bigger with the Picanto, that was my choice.

And a challenge it was. It almost became a mission impossible after opening the door of the Picanto… oh my lord!! The smell that came out of it!!!!! My first thoughts went directly to many taxi-rides I have taken abroad… Often foreign taxi drivers would, for some reason, hang up a magic pine tree in there car… Well, anybody who has been in such a taxi will know exactly what I am talking about! These things smell absolutely horrible! And now “my” taxi had one! The previous owner must have either had a serious smelling problem, or been really smelly him/herself… but who could be more smelly then the pine tree?! You need a serious lack of personal hygiene to accomplish that kind of smell!

It turned out that my “work” was limited to just two pickups in the evening. And where the first day was all about getting to know the job, the second day I could only be distinguished from real taxi drivers by the lack of a meter, a taxi sign on the roof and the fact that I wasn’t driving an old Mercedes, but still struggling without the power steering in the Kia Picanto…

The taxi driver feeling flourished! The smelly car was for free, the radio bad and always on SkyRadio and I even developed the bad taxi driver version of English while talking and turning to my Polish passengers on the backseat. Their English wasn’t so good, and it’s amazing how fast, and with what great enjoyment you can adjust back to their level of English. Conversations all of a sudden sound like: “Work fun today? Yes? You like work? No? You here long time? Holland good? No? Miss Poland? Yes?”.

When the last pickup on Friday evening got cancelled because they had found a Polish friend who could drive them home, I actually felt a bit sad. Wasn’t I good enough as a taxi driver? I drove safely, for as far possible in a Picanto… The smell wasn’t me… I was able to cheer them up with telling them we have Polish supermarkets in Holland and one is actually close by to where they live… We had good conversations… I just hadn’t seen it coming…
Taxi Picanto no more.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 9th, 2006 at 15:06 and is filed under Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.