Taxi driver

I have mad respect for big-city taxi drivers. Not only are they often immigrants who, or all you know, may have been a professor or an engineer back home and are now having to hustle for not a lot of money, constantly facing the risk of getting robbed, but they're also capable of amazing feats of multi-tasking. In Paris I think I had my favorite taxi experience, surpassing Kumar the intrepid snow driver from New York City last year. I got in the taxi at Charles de Gaulle Airport and the driver immediately started going back and forth between two mobile phones (one of which included an earpiece) and the dispatch handset, switching between rapid-fire Vietnamese and French, and sometimes mixing both into the same conversation, all the while passing everyone in sight. Once we got into the city he eased up on the conversation and instead pulled a stack of papers out of his console that were written in Vietnamese and what appeared to be Chinese, scribbling notes whenever we came to a stoplight, then when we got to the hotel started speaking to me in English. I would have liked to have found out what his story was, if only he hadn't been occupied the whole time. (Meanwhile, when I got back to Basel my taxi driver must have been in his 50s or 60s but was listening to a bizarro progressive-rock rendition of H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds, which sounded more like something stoned college students in the 1970s would listen to.)