Being Dumb

One thing that really gets to me, being in the transportation industry, is people who try to tell us the distance between places. As if we either do not know the area or are dumb enough not to check for ourselves the distance between places. And even if we do know the distance between the place, we can't just charge based on that, because we can't send a car 20 miles away to just take you down the street and then have the car drive back and only charge for five minutes of service.

So we get calls like, "I'm looking for a car from Hollywood to Downtown; it's only 15 minutes away." Hollywood and Downtown are probably the places we take people to or pick up from the most. You don't think that we'd know how far apart they are? But the reason they do this is to, I don't know, trick us into charging them $5 or something? It's just the type of thing that what you should do is call and say, "I'm going to need a transportation from Hollywood to Downtown for 8 passengers on this day and this time. How much would that be? Or How much do you charge for that?

But the funniest is this email that I just got from a person wanting a car from Santa Monica to Las Vegas. Then a return at a later date. We do do these types of runs, but that's not what was funny. What's funny is that he requested the car for three hours. For those not in the know, from the very eastern edge of LA county to Las Vegas, it takes three hours at the very least. Santa Monica is at the western edge of LA county, which is by the ocean. To get from Santa Monica to Riverside, which is the eastern part of LA county by the Interstate 15 that goes straight to Las Vegas, is about one and a half to two hours unless traffic is really bad then it could be three or four hours. So this guy is either stupid, or he's trying to trick someone in the transporation industry who, I guess, he feels has no geographical knowledge of the town the service to.