Crazy Taxi Ride

Sunday night I flew back from Ft. Lauderdale to JFK here in New York City and had a bit of an adventure getting from the airport to my apartment...

I found the taxi stand outside the terminal, and the dispatcher gave me an official receipt with the driver's medallion number and I got in.  The driver was a sardar and I had a little trouble understanding exactly what he was asking me, directions to the address I gave him, I think, but he kept abbreviating highways I didn't know...

Then we pulled away from there and got into the road system of the gigantic airport and he suddenly slowed and pulled into the left lane, yelling "fuck, man!" and said he forgot something back at the taxi stand, but I couldn't tell if he said what...  He jumped out of the cab, turning it off, with the meter running and I yelled 'arrey, meter!" so he came back in and stopped it, leaving me sitting there...

After a few minutes I started thinking I'd just get out and go back to the stand myself and get another taxi, since this one wasn't actually taking me anywhere...  Then a tow truck pulled alongside and the driver indicated I should roll down the window.  I did and he asked "where's the driver?" and I said, "I think he said he forgot something back there," and the tow truck driver asked if the car itself was okay and I said "I guess so," and he drove off...

Then another taxi pulled up alongside and my driver got out of the passenger seat and ran around to his door of the cab and got in.  He had a cell phone in his hand that he didn't have exposed earlier, so maybe that's what he forgot, and he fiddled around to plug it into something...

He muttered, "shit, shit, shit..." and then raced away from there at high speed through all the roads in the airport, not slowing to a more normal speed until we were outside the airport.

Then I guess he got on the phone because between periods of silence he was mostly speaking Hindi, or maybe Punjabi (it didn't sound exactly like Hindi) and once in a while I'd hear another voice, probably from a headset in his left ear.

Once we got close to my neighborhood he again asked me something about BQE, which by then I'd figured out was the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, to which I replied in Hindi that I didn't know anything about it.  From there the conversation was simple enough that I answered him in Hindi.  He didn't mention anything about it, but did start calling me "boss".

Oh well, I guess the chaotic part was more amusing than troublesome, and since I had the official receipt from the dispatcher with the driver's medallion number, if anything turned bad I had enough information to report him.

And as one of my relatives commented about it, "only in New York..."