Cabbies who won't take you for a ride
by Melvin Durai, 2005-01-21


Other columns by Melvin Durai

Face it, you still remember the time you asked a cabdriver at JFK Airport in New York to take you to Manhattan and he decided to take a shortcut through Montana. By the time you arrived at your destination, you owed the cabbie more money than you owed on your mortgage. And so you just let him move into your house.

Perhaps all your encounters with cabdrivers have been sour. They don't stop for you, and if they do, the only place they seem interested in taking you is to the cleaners.

But before you pass judgment on the millions of cabbies in the world, you need to realize that some of them are so honest, they'll return almost anything left in their cabs, even Harry Potter books.

Glenn Sher, a Long Island, NY, cabby, returned a woman's purse containing $13,300. That's a lot of money, almost enough to take Paris Hilton on a date.

"I could have used the money to pay bills or whatever," Sher told The New York Post. "But it wasn't mine. I can't take what's not mine." The mayor of New York was truly impressed. "That's amazing," he said. "I didn't realize we had a cabdriver who spoke English."

Another New York cabby, Benjamin Adjepong, was commended by the Taxi and Limousine Commission for returning a bag containing $7,000. "It makes me feel good, and my wife is so excited," he told WABC TV. Now that's a good wife -- excited about her husband's honesty, not even thinking about the number of shoes she could have bought.

Cabbies in other countries have been just as honorable. Ashraf Qureshi, a Pakistani immigrant in Australia, drove a tourist around for three weeks, even let the man make long distance calls on his phone and eat meals in his apartment -- allowed him to do everything but sleep with his wife.

The man paid Qureshi $50,000 for various expenses, according to an Ananova.com report. But after the cabby deposited the money in his bank account, he began to feel guilty about accepting so much and returned $40,000 to the man. "It was all getting too much for me," Qureshi said. It's a good thing he's a taxi driver, because with integrity like that, he could never be a corporate executive.

Executive: "I made $5 million last year. Some of my employees made only $11,000. Maybe I should share some of my money with them."

Wife: "Honey, here's an aspirin. You'll feel better in the morning."

Another honest cabby, Mohammad Sajid Noor Mohammad of Mumbai, India, returned a woman's handbag containing 6,000 rupees, debit cards, credit cards, membership cards, sunglasses, receipts, and thousands of other items that women carry in their handbags.

Though Mohammad lives in a small room with his wife and three children, he wasn't tempted to keep the money and even refused a reward, according to a Mid Day report. "We could have spent the money, but it would have been over in a few days and we would have had to live with the guilt for the rest of our lives," Mohammad said.

While all the celebrities are giving themselves awards, perhaps they should save a few for taxi drivers. "And the nominees for best performance in a taxi cab, front seat only, are ..."

Melvin Durai is a U.S.-based, India-born writer and humorist whose weekly humor columns entertain thousands of people in more than 90 countries.

Other columns by Melvin Durai

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