Cell Phones, Taxicab’s and NY City Taxi Drivers

By: The Cabby Prince

All alone in the City, it’s late at night, in fact the wee lonely hours between midnight and dawn. As times slides by less and less traffic and more and more distance between the driver and the last passenger. Who knows how long before the next fare.

I NEED SOMEONE TO TALK TO.  Flip, press and connect. The conversation begins to a girlfriend or boyfriend in the outer boroughs or a relative in a distant country or a fellow cabby hoping to set a meet for a coffee…..but for now, I am not alone and I need to talk to someone.

We have recently seen the worst of cell phones and automobiles as a young boy’s life was cut short in Harlem when a car, driven by a man on his cell phone, ran the boy down. The cars driver has been accused of talking on his cell phone at the time of the accident and also accused of attempting to leave the scene…

So who might he have been talking to? What could be more important than watching where he was going?

Why is it we, the people talk so much on these 21^st century devices. What are we missing in our lives that, has us on the phone so much of the time….Before cell phones what did we do?? I remember public pay-phones. I liked them much more than cell phones.

A cell phone might be the equivalent of the 24 hour news channels that play the same news over and over again and present it as if it is new. We listen but do not hear the banter between the hosts who are experts at being unobtrusive, and well dressed, reading copy as if it is the Word.

I do not know the exact number but I am sure that cell phone related fatalities is documented someplace. As well, the number of injuries connected to cell phone abuse while operating a motor vehicle, all of which will lead to teary eyed defendants waling before judges of “HOW SORRY THEY ARE….And of course “It will never happen again you honor”.

But what of the eight year old boy in Harlem? Who weeps for him? The defendant? For a while their fates are entwined…. and then the cell phone will ring again. He will listen, ponder and then tell his conscience he has to take the call.