cabbies

Sometimes, Boston's cab drivers are telling the truth; the credit card machines don't work - and it's not their fault.

According to (Boston's own) Charles Pierce of Esquire, the Romney for President campaign shut off staffers' credit cards in the middle of the night on Tuesday, leaving the Boston crew scrambling for money.

From the moment Mitt Romney stepped off stage Tuesday night, having just delivered a brief concession speech he wrote only that evening, the massive infrastructure surrounding his campaign quickly began to disassemble itself. Aides taking cabs home late that night got rude awakenings when they found the credit cards linked to the campaign no longer worked.

Oh, well, need to save that money for 2016, right?

ChezNiki posts a copy of a letter to the Boston transportation commissioner:

Early this morning (July 12th 4:20am) when I returned to Boston at South Station, Medallion Number 1107 of Independent Cab refused to take me to my home which near North Station.

When I got in his car, he turned on the meter but refused to drive. He rolled the window down to complain to the other drivers that I was not going far enough to make a good fare. When I asked him again to take me to North Station, he yelled at me and told me to get out of the cab. I had to take another cab AND give directions, because the second driver was "new" and pretended not to know how to get from South Station to North Station.

This is unacceptible. Unfortunately, this is not the first time Ive had trouble, been refused service, or been driven in the wrong direction on purpose to "run the meter up." ...

Lewis Forman reports that if he weren't so drunk, he might've objected more when his cabby's route from the North End to East Boston took them through Charlestown, Chelsea and Revere:

... Here I am. 2AM with a great buzz working, looking forward to getting home to get some shut eye before work tomorrow. Going through a section of town that I don't know. A driver who obviously doesn't want to have a quick fare and feels like burning gas all the way back to Eastie. But there is a valuable lesson here. Boston cab driver don't know how to get from point A to point B without explicitly telling them how to get there. ...

Jen Stewart took a cab home from the Oak Grove T stop last night. As she got in, she noticed a laptop on the front seat:

... As we pulled out onto Main Street, I was startled by a muffled explosion inside the cab. Yes. Inside the cab. Before I could ask 'what the hell was THAT?!' he sheepishly said, 'Oh. Sorry. I guess I shouldn't try to play Asteroids on my laptop while I'm driving.'