Not just a journey. An education.

So I’ve mentioned before about cab drivers, right? In fact it’s a category, so yeah I must have.  As in, usually conversation swings toward dealings with the fairer sex, and what are the best ways to deal with the dealings.

Not this time, my friend.  So I was headed up to dirty hip brooklyn (two blocks away from my last apartment in the hip universe, as a matter of fact), it was the weekend (last), and seriously sunshinetacular.  No way in hell was I going to head underground for an hour and a half just to get up there.  Sometimes it’s worth paying $30 to get some sun and some breeze.

Blah blah blah.  So this cab driver and I start talking about GPS technology.  He had had trouble getting his garmin to find the street name I was giving him… I ended up having to give him the zipcode (just typing Brooklyn isn’t good enough for hipsterville, apparently).   Blah blah, they can put a man on the moon but they can’t list all the streets in brooklyn, or something.  So he goes, “Well, now it’s all going to be internal.”

“How do you mean, like chips in your brain?”

“Yeah, something like that.  They have the cell phone implant already but noone wants to test it on themselves.  My wife told me.”

“Really? I can’t blame them, what with the radiation, etc.”

“Yeah! And who wants to be available 24/7!?”, cabbie says. “My wife worked high up in telecommunications so she knew all the advanced stuff.  She died three years ago.”

Me: “Whoa! I’m very sorry.  That must be tough.”

“I miss her very much.”

So we go on about tech stuff, he mentions his dead wife a few more times, and I make a joke about the military forcing soldiers to try out the implanted cell phones and he laughs and agrees, adding that they would probably make the minority soldiers try it first.   !! And I go, “HAHA, yeah, they actually do that shit, it’s pretty messed up.”

Cabbie, “yes, definitely, but I love this country.  I always used to tell people I was going to move here. When I was a kid.”

So I ask him where he is from originally.  Morocco. That was new to me. He told me a bunch of stuff about the royal family, it’s education and ties with US bigshots.  Interesting stuff.

 

So what about the wisdom?! Well, here it is.  He told me about a tourism business he had with his best friend in the 70s.  They were partners, ferrying tourists around the major sights and talking about the shit.  One day he’s got to go out of town, so he tells his partner to hold on to his half of the profits for a week while he’s away so that it doesn’t get left somewhere unsafe.  Maybe he can invest it, etc.

He comes back to discover (obviously) that this guy has taken all the business profits and bought a weekend in the mountains with a few hookers.  Gone. Done.  No apologies.  Decades later cabbie returned to Morocco to find this guy still hustling tourists with no net improvement in his life.  The lesson? Don’t trust friends? Noooo….  The lesson is, save your money.  Don’t blow it on hookers.  Save your money.  Sigh.

COMMENT, JERKS!