A cab ride I'll never forget (1999)

There is a 2022 french movie with the same premise (an elderly woman on her way to a hospice asks the taxi driver to drive her through Paris):

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14586118/

I did this for a friend once--housed a friend for 8 months during the pandemic--and it turned out they were just using me and deepening their addiction.

I don't really believe in caring about people anymore.

I argued against that conclusion, but I lost.

I used to work for the fruit companies senior support.

We didn't technically have the capacity for long term relationships with customers, but one woman had a lot of trouble with her fruitpad. She had MS, and her fingers didn't work. So she kept getting angrier and angrier at tier 1 support people who were granted completely useless.

Her issue is that she needed 12 attempts at everything because of her hands, and because of her age she needed the instructions every time. Simple things like, purchasing a song and downloading it were quite an ordeal for her.

After the first time we spoke, I left the ticket open with a note that I had to follow up for some reason. And I did. And we got to talking. She was in an old age home where her kids had left her before they went overseas. She didn't resent them at all tbh, in fact she needed her fruitpad to communicate with them. We left the first ticket open for a month and communicated back and forth. I don't know if management caught wind but they certainly didn't intervene. I guess I just kept her company after a certain point. She always had a book or something she needed adding, and that would always without fail turn into a minimum 1 hour phone call. But seniority bought be a lot of leeway with my stats and honestly I didn't give a shit. We talked about what her kids were up to, and who the worst nurse was that sort of thing.

One day I was handed a new contract to sign that would also give a large blue entity first dibs on anything I built at home. I had just signed on to a software project with a friend and wasn't going to sign his hard work away. They walked me out of the building because it was too hard to get the large blue legal firm to change a contract. So I never got to say goodbye.

I drove a cab maybe twice in my life, I mostly drive in Ubers. On the rare occasion the driver actually wants to talk I always get something interesting out of it. I remember driving to a friend once, and, as per usual I had selected a nearby Google location as the point of drop-off. Turns out it was a sales office for that particular block of flats and I ended getting a 20-minute-long lecture from the driver, who had previously worked on constructing such blocks (very common type of new (2010-) buildings in Poland, out of which all of them are nearly the same other than the exterior looks) which made me swear to myself I'd never live in one of them. One thing that stuck out the most was the fact that there was almost no quality control just because it wasn't worth it at the number of buildings they were pushing out per year.

One thing I've developed over the past few years is to welcome and embrace the strangers' stories. Normally I'd rather go about my way but now I'm genuinely curious and interested. I always get to hear some random interesting stories as they come, tell some stories of my own and show some empathy towards the person telling it. Everyone likes to be heard but we're all too busy and think we have more important things to do. I highly recommend it to anyone.