The Hack Diaries: Tales of Adventure

So I was faced with an ethical dilemma Saturday. I’d picked up a fare at 1000 Southern Artery, which is usually populated with the elderly and occasionally the variously trouble. So when this guys showed up wearing tan Dockers and a tee shirt, pretty much how I’d be dressed if I was allowed to be a bit more casual, I hopped out and popped the trunk and placed his suitcase into the cab’s trunk.
We made the small talk one usually makes with a cab driver once feels comfortable with.
"Yes the weather is nice," he said. It was sunny and around the mid 70s so I agreed.
We observed it was Sept 11.
“Man, hard to believe that was nine years ago.”
“Isn’t it,"I agreed. "It’s a different world since then."
And sports.
“I’ll tell you," he said, the closest he'd come to controversy, but I was still on his side. "Steroids have because as part of the game as a bat and a ball. They know they’re using them, and they’re lying if they say they didn’t know it."
A pleasant enough conversation over the ten minutes to the T station, I popped the trunk and took his bag out for him while he ran the credit card machine and gave me a $2 tip.
I finished up logging the trip in the front seat, then I looked to the right and saw him walking up the T station with a huge split down the back of his pants. If he'd ripped them getting out of the cab, he would have, and worse, I would have heard it. It wasn’t so much a split as it was like he was wearing a pair of assless Dockers.
He’d seemed pleasant, perhaps I should go tell him? He was on his way to the T, so he’d be sitting down, maybe no one would notice. No, the crowd was already pointing and giggling.
Fortunately. I was lucky enough to get another call so I could be off without wrestling my conscience any further.
Which brings up an important point. Crazy people seem to like me. I’m not sure if they perceive me to be a good listener or if they are just able to smell one of their own. One pickup needed a ride from a local drug store to a rental apartment complex. I can’t say which one, because he seems to believe he is a marked man and that members of both the Taliban and the Mossad have his photo on the wall of their Honeycomb hideout and use it for target practice with their Kalashnikovs. A veteran of Desert Storm, I thanked him immediately for his service before he even began to open up on his further exploits of having dropped C4 in the cocaine stores hidden beneath Manuel Noriega’s command bunker several stories beneath the Panama Canal and spitting in the face of Muammar al-Gaddafi1 after his fetishistic assassination, which he'd confessed was something of a pet project for some time, was cancelled for some reason or another. Despite, this deep black ops, special service work., my fare is getting special medication and renting an apartment. Damn system. Just ain't fair.