“I Have Never Felt Worse For A Human Being In My Life”: Taxi Drivers Share The Craziest Stories

A taxi Driver was violently attacked by 2 passenger because he was of Arabic descent a few years ago. Not that long after, maybe 2-3 months top, I was taking a cab and after a few minutes of small talk, turns out my driver was that guy who was attacked. I didn’t ask many questions but he was so gentle, polite and resilient. Gave him a big tip after the ride.

It was about 4am on a really foggy Sunday and I was heading back to the Taxi rank. I was heading through a bridge with a dual-carriageway above it when I spot a person on the bridge. The road on this bridge has no pavements it this caught my eye. I pull up at the side of the road to get a closer look (due to the fog) and realise it's a young woman on the wrong side of the railings. I immediately call 999 and request police and an ambulance then jump out of the taxi to talk to her. I've dealt with my own mental health issues in the past as well as having a few people close to me that suffer from various issues. I got her chatting about her life, general things. I shared from my life too in the hopes of connecting or at the very least distracting her. Eventually the paramedics and police arrive and long story short she was alive. It was terrifying to see someone in pain and all I could do was to chat about random stuff.

I'm a very part time Uber driver and recently had a pick up going to a doctor's office/clinic. When I got close to the building I could clearly see from the road that my passenger was extremely upset. After a couple minutes she proceeded to tell me that she was 12 weeks pregnant with twins and had just found out that both had passed away. To make it even more emotional she showed me pictures of the ultrasound. I have never felt worse for a human being in my life. After I dropped her off I had to park and re group my head for about an hour. That was freaking rough.

Friend of mine was a taxi driver and told me this story. It's the dead of winter and my friend picked an old dude up from a bar and drove him home. The guy was dead drunk and at some point on his way home had my friend pull over so he could puke. He does, guy pukes his guts out and when he's OK they continue home. Guy pays.. all is well. The next day the dispatch calls my friend and says they tracked him down from the guys description and time he got home. They say he needs to go pick the guy up that he drove home last night. He picks the guy up and the guy tells him they need to go to where he puked. My friend notices that the guy can hardly talk. After a bit of searching they find where the guy puked. Old dude gets out and finds his in-puke-frozen-dentures and gets them out of the gutter. Success. Dude has his teeth back. Driver gets a fat a*s tip. Everybody is happy.

I have a relative who is one. One night, near the end of his shift, he’s at the front of the line up, and a bunch of guys say they want to go somewhere pretty far. It’ll be a really big fare, especially for the end of the night. But something about it is making his hair stand up. He says no, that’s too far for him and he’s going home soon. He tells the driver behind him not to take these guys. The driver laughs, calls my relative a dumb N word, and takes the guys. Next day? The other driver is found dead. They robbed and murdered him. He lost his life, for the promise of a $100 dollar fare. Always trust your gut!

I drove a cab as a 2nd job for a while in Boise, ID. Had a lady fly her private plane from Boise to Jackson Hole, WY. She left her purse in the Boise airport by accident. Hired a cab to pick up the purse and deliver it to Jackson Hole (5.5hr drive each way). She paid the fare and tipped $200. After it was delivered, asked why she didn’t just mail it. She said she had her diamonds in her purse. Oh the lives of rich people.

The weirdest one has to be a very attractive mid 30s lady that I picked up at a Walmart at around 8 PM, she asked me if there's any limit to how far she can go, I told her there is not, so she wanted to go to her boyfriend's grandmother's house, which was in a small rural town about 70 miles away. I'm thinking this is the easiest money I've ever made, and I wasn't wrong. We finally make it there and she's like wait don't go into the driveway yet, and she's looking around, and she says Ok good, he's here at his grandma's house like he says he was, which means he's not cheating on me. Ok, we can go back now. So we drive 70 miles back where we came from, stopping by different convenience stores and fast food places, she buys me food and asks me if I want anything along the way, and I take her home, the ride is up to $450 at this point and it's around 1 AM. She starts bringing all her stuff into the house and she comes back and asks me if I want to come inside, I can keep the meter running so I'm technically still on the job. I told her I can't, and she paid the tab and gave me a $100 tip. I always wonder what would have happened if I went in there. I was 22 at the time.

Back in the 90’s I did some cabbing in a small South Coast town in England. We had contracts for some school runs, normally these were to pick up kids who’d been excluded from state schools. One day I had 3 lads in the car aged about 9-12 I’d say. Kid in the front was arguing with one in the back and called him a wanker. I quietened them down and it was silent for about a minute. Kid in the front then pipes up “What is a w*nker?” I said “I don’t think that’s the sort of thing I should be telling you lads. Ask your parents. What do you think it is?” He ponders for a moment and says “Well, I’ve always presumed it’s part of a woman.” Nearly crashed!

Ex UK Uber driver here, this story is the one I tell every time I get asked how it was to drive people around.

I picked up this dude from a wedding at around 8pm in the evening. He was completely wasted and I could hardly understand what he was saying. After around 15 minutes I finally get where he wants to go, the hospital.

It's only at this point that I notice something very wrong with his shoulder, it has a stiletto heel hanging out of it. Turns out he had been dancing with a girl at the wedding who wasn't his girlfriend, she responded to this by impaling him in the shoulder with one of the high heels she was carrying around.

Surprisingly there wasn't a lot of blood and the guy was in quite good spirits about the whole ordeal, I always wonder what happened to him after that evening.

Forgot about two others that my relative still talks about. My relative picks up a bunch of people from a Caribbean food store. They load up the trunk with a ton of bags of food. When they get close to the destination, that my relative is clearly driving towards and knows where they are going (this is pre GPS), they start giving specific directions, like turn here, straight here, which is usually a tell tale sign that they are going to try to run and skip out on the fare. Which they do. My relative locks the doors and sits there calmly. When they realize he’s not running after them they stop, and turn. He grins, points to the trunk, and starts to back up slowly. The idiots realize that they have run out on a $20 fare, but also on Iike $250 dollars worth of groceries. They run after him yelling “cabbie we’ll pay, we’ll pay.” He bounces. Brings the groceries home to his Caribbean wife, who gives him mad props for picking out such great stuff.

Another similar story - two dudes load up a ton of black garbage bags into the trunk, run out on the fare. Relative drives off, opens the trunk, and finds that those garbage bags are full of WEED. Gives the bags of weed to a fellow cabbie that he knows smokes. Refuses money, just wants the stuff gone. And as a Black dude, no way he’s going to the police. Couple weeks later, the other cabbie just drops two grand in his back seat. He donates it all to charity.

Friend of mine at work is a retired Taxi driver and told me this story. He was dropping off 2 riders in Aurora CO and decided to help this elderly couple with their bags. He walked their bags to their doorstep and noticed 2 guys attempting to steal his taxi. He ran towards them and was able to have half his body in the car because he had the windows down while they were driving. He was able to turn the wheel and they drove straight into a stop sign. He said adrenaline kicked in and he started to fight both guys. He said he got quite a few licks into one guy while the other ran and left his buddy there. I forgot to mention but at this point my friend was around 350ish pounds. Anyways cops show up, separate my friend and the guy stealing his car. The cops had to call the ambulance for both people because my friend had beaten this guy to a pulp. My friend then mentions that the cops said how are you still walking and he looks down and notices he has a knife in his stomach. I guess adrenaline kicked in and he never felt it. To make a long story short, he got to the hospital and they had to remove a little more than half his stomach. He now currently weighs around 160 or so. So good for him for basically getting some form of weight loss surgery out of it.

I was a cab driver for three years when I was in my early 20’s. Was driving the 15 passenger van picking people up from a music festival. Van is full of drunks and I see in the rear view mirror one woman is looking rough. I told her I will pull over for her to puke because we had a rule that if someone pukes you charge them a couple hundred bucks. She tells me I don’t need to do that and proceeds to take a ziplock bag out of her purse, chunders her heart out into the ziplock, perfectly, zips it closed and puts it back in her purse. Apparently she has thrown up in a lot of cabs before and learned to adapt. I was very impressed.

I had a habit of asking this question to every cabbie in every taxi I took for a few years. One that sticks with me is the cabbie was stopped at a red light and a body landed on the hood of his car, smashing the hell out of it (s*icide jumper from a condo balcony). I felt pretty bad for asking because he didn’t seem to want to relive that.

My dad was a cab driver for 20 years. He had plenty of stories about drunks, fighting couples, women in labor, people nearly missing their flight, etc. Three I remember the most:

He was dropping off a young man and had come to a stop but hadn't put the car in park yet. The passenger jumped out, then leaned back in through the open door with a knife and demanded Dad's money. Dad just stomped on the gas and knocked the idiot out of the car. He tried to back over the guy but he jumped up and ran away before Dad could get the car into reverse.

He was renting his car to another driver on his day off. She had a diabetic blackout and rammed the car into a wall at the airport at 40 mph. Fortunately, she survived and didn't hit anyone else but Dad couldn't work for a couple of weeks while he found a new car.

He was driving a guy to a small airport where the guy's friend had a plane and they were going to fly to some event that morning. When they got there, the plane wouldn't start because it had a dead battery. So my dad grabbed his jumper cables from the trunk and gave the plane a jump start. He got a nice tip.

One funny thing about one of his taxis was that it was an old police car and still had the spotlight. He would use it to find house numbers and also to heat up frozen burritos while he was waiting for fares.

I was an Uber driver back about 5 years ago. I picked up this guy over by the Boston Garden after the bars closed. While waiting at the next light, this drunk girl in the back seat of the car to my left saw me and we both had our windows rolled down.

She then proceeded to say:

"Oh....a ginger man! I love gingers. Hey! Take me out! I love your hair so much!"

To put it into perspective, I am a bald man with ginger hair and have a beard.

Here friends were in the car trying to get her to stop talking and she let this slip out:

"I want to suck your d**k....I LOVE GINGER D**K!!!! AMY HAVE I TOLD YOU HOW MUCH I LIKE GINGER D**K!!!!"

The light changed to green and we went our separate ways.

Ma'am, who ever you are, thank you very much for this story and the compliment. As a heavyset bald ginger dude, I felt like a damn celebrity for those 2 minutes. Even the passenger was jokingly chuckling saying, "Hey man, you should get her number".

Not a driver but was a dispatcher about 15 years ago. My main job was to clear the board by the end of the night so there were no waiting fares by the time everyone went home(suburban can company). In order to do so you had to make friends and know who the workers were. About 2 am one night I had a fare left in a not so decent town going to an another questionable place however it wasn’t uncommon for the area. Had a driver call in saying he was logging out for the night if there was nothing else. I told him I had one that was still pending if he wanted it. He obliged. Being a stale fare I called and made sure they still wanted to be picked up customer said yes. Thought nothing of it and finished my shift. Came into work the next day and found out the driver was shot multiple times near the destination town, but managed to hold the offender down until police arrived and then was hospitalized after with life threatening injuries. Went through the whole interview process with PD etc and eventually the driver died due to his wounds. To this day in my mid thirties I still feel responsible for that night instead of just letting the driver go home. Hard worker with a wife and kids and me just a dumb 20 y/o at the time. Don’t know that I’ll ever be able to not feel responsible.

One time, I picked up a passenger who insisted they were running late for an important meeting. We were zooming through the streets like a scene out of a movie when suddenly, they asked me to stop the car. I obliged, thinking they needed to rush out for their appointment. Instead, they got out, paid the fare, and ran off... leaving behind a briefcase full of rubber chickens! To this day, I'm still puzzled about that incident. Was it a prank? A strange business venture? Who knows!

Drove years ago.

A really smashed guy gets in the back and says something like "Frbshr shtreet". I ask him to repeat it and he says the same thing. I look in my street directory and there is indeed a place called "Frobisher street" so we set off.

By the time we get there he's asleep. I pull over and start shouting "wake up!". He stirs and I ask what number is his house. He opens the door, falls out, and promptly goes back to sleep on the grass. I sigh and think that I'm probably not getting paid for this one, the fare is about $15. I briefly contemplate leaving him there, but it's 2am and cold enough that he might get hypothermia if I do. So I get out and wake him up again, hoik him up under the arms and ask again which house.

As it turns out, it's only three houses down so I put one of his arms over my shoulder and walk/drag him to his door. He has no money on him and says "jush gotta get it inside, wait here", so I do while he goes inside and I think for the second time "I'm probably not getting paid" but I hang around and a couple of minutes later he staggers out again and sort of collapses at my feet. He reaches up and gives me at $50 note. I say I'll need to get change and he reaches for my fly and I don't know if he's confused about our relationship but I push his hand away and say -"woah buddy! I don't swing that way". He hands me another $50 note and says "please" in a really plaintive way. I demur and try to give the money back but he just tells me to keep it.

So I left, $100 richer.

Not a driver but my first time in NY (Bronx) my taxi driver hit a dude on a bike broad daylight. Dude was trying to speed across the road while taxi was turning so it wasn’t really a bad collision at all. Taxi driver rolls down the window and cusses the biker out. Biker proceeds to pick up his bike and throw it at the taxi. They both flick each other off at the same time, both laugh at the timing & then just go on about their day. People around looked but didn’t actually seem too concerned or amused. I’m in the backseat at a loss for words.

That’s the day I found out NY is just different.

Not a cab driver, but I gave a cab driver a story to tell. I was a stock analyst on a marketing tour. These consist of giving a breakfast presentation, flying to a different city to give a lunch presentation, etc.. I had my breakfast presentation in Zurich and went to the airport to get the flight to Geneva. It was cancelled. So I had a problem: there would be 25 important clients in Geneva waiting for me at a very expensive restaurant. So I walked over to the cab line and asked a young cab driver how long it would take to get to Geneva. He looked stunned and said "I've never been to Geneva", which I thought was rather odd. He called his dispatcher and told me it would be 2 and 1/2 to 3 hours. So I said "Would you like to got to Geneva?". He really lit up. So I spent the next few hours chatting with this pleasant young guy. Apparently I made his day. He got me there with a few minutes to spare. I don't actually remember the fare (I think it was 900 francs but this was in 2000) and gave him a huge tip. Man - he was a happy guy.