big yellow taxi
One of my landlord's frequent events on a Saturday afternoon is to head down to the Viceroy for a meal and a piss up with his buddies. This means I am the beneficiary of a lift down to the university on Saturday afternoons and consequently, I've gotten to know the taxi drivers who visit. All of them are well known to my landlord, which indicates a long standing habit of Saturday afternoon taxi rides. And here's the odd thing. Odd enough to blog about. All, yes all of the 5 blokes whom I've talked to thus far have either had or are still in the middle of a career in IT.
The guy I chatted to today was new. Well, first time I've met him anyway. In his taxi, he had a P800 mounted to the dashboard, a Garmin GPS system which he said he bought for his personal use and ... a flash memory based MP3 player. Along the journey, he discussed the relative merits of ZoneAlarm firewalls with my landlord, knew about port scanners and as I found out a bit later, works as a systems administrator for a local company. Ok, so ferrying people to and from pissups is a profitable sideline for a sysadmin. Noted. I learn something new every day.
Another chap worked for 19 years (he said) in the city council and before that, for an unspecified number of years in industry. Much older than today's bloke, he called IT a "young man's job. too many systems, too much new hardware and software packages to maintain". In fact, every one of the taxi drivers I've talked to so far has a similar story. Those two stories are merely the edge cases. What is it with IT folk and driving taxis ? Is this a blip in statistics ? A rich clump of moonlighting taxi drivers in the vegetative masses of eye tee drones ?
Maybe taxi driving is a profitable sideline. Or just maybe ... the evil outsourcing trends are forcing people to abandon their ergonomic keyboards and wrist brace supported mice for steering wheels and CB radios. Well, if that sort of career change is on the cards for the majority of IT peeps, I fricking well want a three wheeler with a huge ass subwoofer. Face it, the average three wheeler chap has a lot less regulation to contend with. Beats driving a boring taxi any day.
The guy I chatted to today was new. Well, first time I've met him anyway. In his taxi, he had a P800 mounted to the dashboard, a Garmin GPS system which he said he bought for his personal use and ... a flash memory based MP3 player. Along the journey, he discussed the relative merits of ZoneAlarm firewalls with my landlord, knew about port scanners and as I found out a bit later, works as a systems administrator for a local company. Ok, so ferrying people to and from pissups is a profitable sideline for a sysadmin. Noted. I learn something new every day.
Another chap worked for 19 years (he said) in the city council and before that, for an unspecified number of years in industry. Much older than today's bloke, he called IT a "young man's job. too many systems, too much new hardware and software packages to maintain". In fact, every one of the taxi drivers I've talked to so far has a similar story. Those two stories are merely the edge cases. What is it with IT folk and driving taxis ? Is this a blip in statistics ? A rich clump of moonlighting taxi drivers in the vegetative masses of eye tee drones ?
Maybe taxi driving is a profitable sideline. Or just maybe ... the evil outsourcing trends are forcing people to abandon their ergonomic keyboards and wrist brace supported mice for steering wheels and CB radios. Well, if that sort of career change is on the cards for the majority of IT peeps, I fricking well want a three wheeler with a huge ass subwoofer. Face it, the average three wheeler chap has a lot less regulation to contend with. Beats driving a boring taxi any day.
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