For most people, the term hazing usually triggers a mental image of college boys yelling and screaming at puny little 18-year-old boys, forcing them to chug concoctions of toothpaste, meatloaf, pickle juice, and other substances which a girl could not come up with if she tried. Yeah, that’s what I used to think of until my friend pointed out to me that I haze cab drivers with ridiculous demands. When I tried to claim that it was just a one time thing, she started rattling off all the times I hazed cab drivers and so I decided I had to put this in writing.

So you get in a cab and tell the driver where you want to go, they drop you off, they give you a fee to pay, you pay it and get out, right? Wrong. That is not how it works with me, not when late night dance parties, cigarette-smoking, late night food, and being short on change is involved.

As I started reminiscing about all of my cab ride experiences, one particular time came to mind. It was about 1AM when my friend and I decided we were tired of the bar scene and were going to head home, so we split a cab. We dropped her off first because I decided I wanted to swing by our local neighborhood bar to pick up a pizza on the way home. I drunkenly called the pub, placed an order for a veggie pizza, the cab driver dropped off my friend, and took me to the bar.

When we arrived, I told him that the pizza would not be ready for another ten minutes and demanded that he turn off the car so that the meter did not run up my bill. He turned the car off without argument, believe it or not. It was a non-smoking cab but we had time to kill so I asked him if I could smoke in his car and he said no. When I asked him why not he told me he would get in trouble with the cab company. I assured him that everything would be okay and he just needed to get an air-freshener; I lit my cigarette, he said nothing, and I won the battle. About ten minutes after sitting in the driveway of the pub, I asked him in my kindest tone if he would take my cash inside the bar and get my pizza. People were still there and I did not want to run the risk of seeing anyone I knew who might question why I was by myself, intoxicated, retrieving a pizza at 1:15 in the morning and getting back into a sketchy van.

Without hesitation, the cabbie got out of the van, took my cash and went inside to pay for my pizza. While I sat there in the backseat of the van trying to be discrete about this pizza mission, the sliding door swung open and all of the lights in the cab turned on; the cab driver handed me my remaining cash and pizza and I saw a crowd of people at the bar just staring at me sitting in the back of the cab. I waved to the bouncer who I had made friends with at a karaoke bar as I grabbed the door and slammed it shut in the hopes that no one else spotted my pathetic state of laziness. As we drove away, the cab driver could not stop laughing because his other fat-ass of a cab driver buddy (one that I have crossed paths with in previous cab ride experiences) was making snide remarks about the “piece of shit” that could not get out of the cab and get her own pizza.

In closing, the only two conclusions I made were the following: one, the veggie pizza was delicious and, two, I really do not care what that colossal cab driver was saying about me. I have witnessed him almost hitting a telephone poll when driving inebriated kids, one of them being me, from one place to another and making inappropriate phone calls to one of my friends after-hours to see what she was up to because he was bored; maybe he should be the one considering his ranking on the “piece of shit” scale. As for me, I can say my only regret is that I wish I would have gotten this particular cabbie’s number; he has a “can-do” attitude that needs to permeate the rest of the cab-driving universe.