Rant: Kerb your enthusiasm
Alex Wong
Part of my initiation the day I started work at an advertising agency in this city in 1991 had little to do with the job itself. My first task was to get to the office on time - and that was when I encountered Nab the Hong Kong Taxi, a game akin to scrambling in the ruck for a rugby ball.
Determined and resourceful, however, I scored my first try by negotiating with a rival to share the next cab that came along. We were soon scooting along Blue Pool Road together, me divulging my need to find a flat that week. Pre-business cards, pre-internet, pre-Facebook, she later tracked me down at work and that night I was signing for an apartment that was way better than the 25 others I'd viewed.
Such a feature of Hong Kong in the past, whatever happened to sharing cabs? Even when there's a typhoon blowing dogs off chains, or those ubiquitous stockinged legs (an advert for some erotic cabaret show in Macau) off the cab roof, nowadays it seems it's every man for himself.
Subscribing to Andy Warhol's idea that it only takes two people to have the same thought at the same time to create a trend, of late I have been trying to revive the sharing tradition. The results have been disappointing: I've lost count of the number of people who, on my approach, have scurried off to the MTR, looking back at me askance. On the plus side, their sudden disappearance eliminates the competition, leaving me on my own to claim the next cab.
After one such victory, I found myself being driven by a man who had affixed his smartphone to his windscreen and was watching a movie on it - Titanic. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry, but it struck me this was merely the tip of the iceberg in the eccentric world of Hong Kong taxi-taking.
