Bird in Hand

Tonight I stopped for a flag on the way to a dispatched call, which took me in the opposite direction of the dispatch. The flag ran off from a $20 fare, went inside the warren of a housing project to get money... yeah right. I waited ten minutes for them to come back, then got fed up and booked to the call.

By the time I reached the house where the dispatch had originated they had split, too. The place was a huge country house with four varieties of done-up SUV in the driveway. After only a few minutes a Porsche SUV pulled into the driveway,

"I was right here when they called to cancel the dispatch, about twenty minutes ago," the woman said, as if I might not believe her.

"I never received that message," I said.

When I pulled the flag, my computer set to Loaded, meaning that the office thought I'd picked up the dispatched fare. They wouldn't need to let me know the ride was cancelled, since on their screen I had been traveling with the fare for twenty minutes or more.

A new rule: don't go for flags.