I drove a taxi for about 3.5 years. Mostly it was random people going places. Taxi driving is not the most intellectually stimulating job, so I amused myself by talking to my passengers to figure out if they had anything to teach me. After a few shifts I became aware of a
Metaphysical Matching Algorithm, where I was being sent specific passengers for reasons more than just 'transportation'.
I'm still in contact with a woman I met on my 8th shift. She txt'd me for a ride ~4 days after her taxi ride. I remembered her, but couldn't figure out why she'd decided to call me back: 'I talk to everyone, but I didn't talk to them'. On her follow up ride she reminded me of the little informative txt message I'd sent them after I'd driven away, and how that little act motivated her to reach out to me when she needed to go to the store for a suitcase. She eventually made a short film that was inspired by how we met. The specific details are all wrong, which is why it's only "inspired by a true story", lol. The series of passengers that led me to my future-friend was 1. passenger going home from the hospital in central Phoenix [delay], 2. lady going home to Mesa [transfer fare - 15 miles], 3. Grandma going to the pharmacy [delay], then I got my 'appointment' to meet my future-friend in the metropolitan area's far southeast corner.
Sometimes my random questions revealed that my passenger had interesting experiences, such as the fellow who'd spent a lot of time on the secret bases in Nevada: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33640535 (My username was inspired by K5 user "Zombie Jesus Christ", whom I eventually visited in jail in California. Followup comment in this thread tells of my username's origin story.)
I've commented before about the passenger I bailed out of jail. I distinctly remember the night I met him at the convenience store at Cave Creek & Bell Rd: "Are you available?" "Sure, hop in." He'd come to Arizona on a technology contract with a big bank, but the contract was canceled. Then his van and everything he owned got stolen. I don't remember the series of fares that led me to be in exactly his location that night... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34157865
Lots of stories like this. One passenger leads to the next. When I was between passengers sometimes I followed my intuitions trying to figure out where I'd find my next passenger. I tried to talk to everyone: everyone has a story & I tried to figure out if they had something I thought interesting. Sometimes I had the sense that I had 'appointments', othertimes I had the sense that there was no one else to meet that day.
One of my standard lines of inquiry for couples, or people who mentioned their relationship, was 'how did you meet?' Sometimes it was a boring story ("met in elementary school"), sometimes intuition made their improbable connection possible.
(Intuition is when we do things that turn out well, without having a well-formed logical reason for doing so: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/17/well/intuition-gut-instin... )
One of my better stories was "Passenger Rescue" and "Passenger Rescue, Pt 2": http://www.taxiwars.org/2012/07/passenger-rescue.html / http://www.taxiwars.org/2012/08/passenger-rescue-pt-2.html (originally these were diaries on Kuro5hin.org [RIP]):
When we got back to his father's apartment
complex my passenger asked,
"What's the fare?"
"This one's on me."