Yesterday morning I jumped into a cab outside my flat, having missed the bus. It was only as we arrived at my office that I realised I didn't have my wallet with me. Chastened, I told the taxi driver I had no money (to be precise, HK$102 was the amount owing), whereupon he immediately suggested that I could transfer it to his bank account and wrote down the number for me, from memory. This morning I got an email from him: "Thanks for your payment. Jimmy Yip (Taxi Driver)".
I quake at the thought of trying the same stunt with a spectacularly bad-tempered, know-it-all London cabbie - or indeed with any cab driver, anywhere else in the world. Perhaps it was patronising of me to imagine that a cab driver in his fifties would not be using the internet? It was lucky for me that my driver turned out to be Jimmy Yip.
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4 comments:
Oh I like stories like this - they restore my faith in human nature!
Something similar happened to me recently. I was at the petrol station and the young girl in front of me didn't have enough money to pay for petrol that she had just put into her tank. She gave the attendant her name and address and promised faithfully that she would come back the next day to pay for the fuel. I don't actually know if she came back to pay but I would like to think that she did :-)
I think for the sake of completeness you need to go back to the petrol station and find out if she did eventually pay up!
Poeple in Hong Kong put a lot of faith in the business card - everyone carries one and the first thing you do when you meet someone new is exchange cards. He dropped me off outside my office, and the same address was on the card I gave him, so he knew how to find me with reasonable certainty. But even so, there's something reassuring about this story. He trusted me to do what I said I would do without any concern.
once in the middle of Morocco we filled up a practically empty tank and naively thought they'd take credit card - they didn't. We had not enough cash on us. The attendant let us leave without leaving any surety, told us where the nearest ATM was (a 30 minute drive) and told us to come and pay later when it was convenient!
Small acts of faith and human kindness are remembered forever.
Nice to see you here, Gweipo. Petrol stations must get this a lot - I've got no idea how they deal with it, but I suspect that this is quite an unusual response.
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