The first Uber driver I summoned had a sharp trowel-shaped beard — and was angry. But then I had committed the cardinal error of tapping on the rear window of his vehicle.
There was a novelty bumper sticker in the ‘90s that read, in supposedly comic, badly-spoken-with-an-Italian-accent English: “You toucha my car I smasha your face.” It wasn’t particularly funny then and it wouldn’t be funny now, either to mimic an Italian badly or to have your face “smashed”, simply because you touched steel — a material which, in my experience, is one of those least likely to suffer from the impress of a single human hand.
It’s the human hand that gets egregiously shredded by a single lead bullet or sliver of shrapnel — and would certainly suffer from the impact of a car weighing half a ton, which is the possibility I was attempting to forestall, or draw this man’s attention to; or, at any rate, this individual who thought he was a man — because there is still something, even in this day and age, about presence behind the wheel that makes individuals who are convinced their biological sex constitutes their raison d'être to behave accordingly. My mother would speak wistfully of “knights of the open road”, the implication being that such creatures were as rare as unicorns’ horns.
Yet the fact remains that you should never do that to any driver of any identity or group, but especially a contemporary urban one in a supposedly contemporary urban context. A couple of years ago when a driver nearly ran me over at an intersection, I followed him into the road, rapped on the flank of his vehicle, and then nearly did get my face smashed. I more or less grovelled to placate the fulminating fellow. Why? Not for my benefit because I feared fisticuffs — I’m rather fond of them, and having boxed as a light-heavyweight at club levels, would probably, even at my age, have put him flat on his arse in five seconds, unless he had the moves.
No: it was for his. He was an Uber driver, and a first-generation immigrant from the Global South. An assault charge would ruin his life — and in common with all major retailers, I always press charges.
I thought of this incident when this other driver nearly ran over my toes; when it occurred I’d been scarcely using Ubers, or indeed taxis of any form. Neither do I own a private car, although I occasionally hire one. No, for well over 20 years now it’s been foot, cycle, Tube, bus in that order. I gave up the family car after a driver coming out of the McDonald’s on the Wandsworth Road — who was presumably having a hypoglycaemic fit after ODing on a McFlurry, which had just been introduced — ran straight into my six-seater Fiat Multipla.
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