A couple days ago, I was making a pickup at a clients office. I got into the elevator with a big guy and a little guy who came out of an architecture firm that shares the floor with our client. Big guy is carrying an armful of plans and seems kind of irritated. Little guy asks what he is doing with them, and big guy says "I gotta take these over to City Hall right now. Nobody better try to talk to me about them when I get there, I just want to drop them off. I don't have time for this."
Little guy looks at me and smiles, "This guy looks like he is ready to go! Why don't you just have him take them over there?"
I look at big guy and say "Yeah, why don't you just have a messenger take them for you? I can give you my company's phone number if you want."
Big guy scoffs, mutters something under his breath, and says "I don't have time for this shit, I gotta get a cab."
We all get out of the elevator and walk out to the street. Big guy hails a cab while I am unlocking my bike. The cab catches the red light at the corner, and I jump on my bike, ride past big guys cab, safely cut the red light, and am three blocks away before the light turns green and big guy is moving again.
Later on in the day, I thought about this situation some more. So lets say big guy makes $15.00 an hour, which doesn't seem too unreasonable. It probably took him about an hour round trip from the time he left his desk until he returned. If he took a cab to City Hall, I'm sure he took a cab back. It wasn't a long trip, but it costs about $5.00 each way before tip (big guy seemed like kind of a prick, so I'm just going to assume he didn't tip the cabbie) . In total, it probably cost his company at least $25.00 to have him bring some plans to city hall and drop them off.
Pretty much any messenger company in the city would have done the run on a half-hour service for around $12.00. The cab that he hailed was driving around empty looking for a fare, and he would have taken another cab back from city hall, which would have been driving up and down LaSalle street trying to get a fare.
I got pretty irritated thinking about the whole thing. It cost big guy's company at least twice as much money to get the plans to city hall this way. Any messenger would have been glad to do the run, our industry is hurting right now and we could use more income. I won't dwell on the cab aspect too much, because those guys need to make a living too. But it seems like there are a lot of people in the loop who take unnecessary cab rides. Big guy's office was less than a mile from city hall, and it was a beautiful day. I would have just walked if I didn't have a bike. The streets downtown are so overcrowded with traffic, and a huge percentage of the traffic is cabs, many of which are driving around empty looking for fares, or taking people on really short trips.
The whole situation just didn't make sense.
Friday, August 7, 2009
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
2 comments:
I wouldn't take it personally. I'm sure Big Guy would have liked to just drop his plans off, but in reality he probably spent half a day waiting in line and then another hour going over the drawings with a reviewer.
Yeah, if that was the case, I totally understand, except that he still could have walked them over. They were packaged up in big envelopes, though. So I figured that he was just dropping them off.
Post a Comment