On a bright Sunday morning, the job was to pickup from one of the more upmarket Lake District country house hotels and takes some folks the 100miles to Manchester airport.
The luggage was loaded and my fare turned out to be a German couple and an English guy in his thirties who had been attending a posh wedding at the hotel.
They were all flying back to Tenerife where they were living and working.
They seemed to be a reasonably intelligent and sophisticated group and the ride went quickly and smoothly enough, with the couple chatting and the guy playing with his i-phone.
That is until we reached the airport and its unloading point. Now as the airport is very busy and security is very tight only a few minutes are allowed to unload before you are firmly moved on.
The only thing which needed to be done before we unloaded the luggage was to quickly pay me the £90 owed for the taxi fare.
They were it turned out splitting the fare between the couple and the single guy and so they each had some notes in their hands.
I could not believe it when the single guy instead of handing over the cash appeared to be concentrating on sending a text on his i-phone.
This went on for a full two minutes and I was getting more and more stressed thinking about the parking fine that I would surely be getting.
But then looking a bit closer at his beloved phone I realised with amazement that he was actually using the calculator function to try and figure out half of £90.
“Forty five” I blurted out a bit too loudly whilst rolling my eyes and shaking my head in exasperation.
Believe it or not, he then actually finished checking this simple sum on his phone for a further thirty seconds before handing over the cash.
Don’t think I have ever come as close to swearing before.
