Idle Time

The taxi business in Worcester during the weekdays is intimately tied in with the weather. The worse the weather is, the better the business... and vice-versa.

One of the reasons is that when the weather really starts getting nice, that's (coincidentally) when schools are winding up their year. By the end of June, daily business has usually dropped off by about one third from what it was during the winter. And it isn't so much that there's a lot of business bringing anyone to or from school, but rather that this is a college town. It's also a town where a huge proportion of students are driven to and from public schools every day, or to and from their bus stops. The traffic levels for school days are more than double what they are for days when schools are not in session.

Everything is just busier in this city when schools are in session.

It's this time of year, though, when idle time starts becoming a greater porportion of the time I spend in the cab each day.

I tend to want to find a spot in the shade when it looks like I'll be idle for more than a couple of minutes. A car is more like a greenhouse when you're in one for lengthy periods during the warmer weather... even on a day like today.

The school summer vacation is the slowest time of the year for the taxi business. It's always a lesson in how to spend that idle time every day. You learn to either take naps, or read a book or the paper... all sorts of time wasting methodologies can be employed to pass the time.

Last summer, I used to see how fast I could do all the puzzles in the paper. By August, I was usually able to finish them all in less than a half hour. Then I'd read the whole paper, ...everything ...very slowly ...no speed reading.