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The Cab Ride I'll Never Forget
- dot-sean 14y agoThis guy posted it to his google+ page, without crediting original author. Let's make sure we +1 it so his friends know where his great ideas come from: https://plus.google.com/104314192726025938964/posts/4GjXTPTzSJx https://plus.google.com/104314192726025938964/posts/4GjXTPTz...
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- carterschonwald 14y agoIf this story doesn't nearly or outright bring a tear to your eye, please pause for a moment and ask yourself why. [edit: it doesn't matter whether it's real vs fiction, it's a question of how you would react if you did something in the normal course of what you do, and then come to realize at it had a profoundly positive impact on someone else. Is not the romanticized part of the modern conception of a startup a blend of changing people's lives positively at skill via products that make the world better plus a dash of hopefully positioning yourself to there after only work on projects that capture your eye? I will not dispute that the story here is cute and possibly fiction. But even if your day to do focus is building better tech in some domain, it's about building better tools for other people. ]
- tallanvor 14y agoBecause not all of us are affected emotionally to the same extent as you? I can agree that the person telling the story did a good deed without feeling overly moved by the story.
- VMG 14y agobecause it probably is not true edit: it seems to be true in the sense that the guy wrote it in a book years ago http://www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/c/cabbie.htm http://www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/c/cabbie.htm
- etfb 14y agoI think it probably is true, but there's not enough evidence either way to allow that to be a factor.
- anatoly 14y agoBecause it isn't true. Because it's a hackneyed creation of a shallow imagination peopled with cardboard characters, made to press the emotional buttons especially popular today. Because real people don't say "You gave an old woman a little moment of joy". Because death and loneliness and loss and memory are all so much more than this Hallmark card of a story. Because it's so fake, and so corny.
- mortenjorck 14y agoThe story brought to mind the movie Crash (2004). I remember thinking "wow, this is basically just manipulating me as a viewer to bring a tear to my eye" – and it worked, just as this story did.
- lobster_johnson 14y agoI agree that it at least seems fake. She's moving out her home at 02:30 AM to move into a hospice? They take a detour and she's two hours late, yet the orderlies are immediately around to assist her (presumably it's 04:30 AM now)? There are no details in the story, like place names, that would support the claim that it's a true story.
- Klinky 14y agoI'll also add that he claims he was a driver for Yellow Cab. His boss is going to be pissed if he spent half the night not collecting fares. Edit: As noted by tptacek he was probably an independent contractor. Also he mentioned that impoverished people relied on the taxis. Impoverished people cannot afford taxis and taxi drivers are not big on giving free rides.
- tptacek 14y agoCab drivers, including Yellow Cab drivers, don't work for "Yellow Cab". Each individual cab is a franchise operation with its own P&L. Cab drivers don't typically have "bosses".
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- SkyMarshal 14y agoBecause I get email forwards like this all the time, written by some bored political pr email hack on his lunch break just sharpening his craft (you know the guys who create those shady emails about Obama that get forwarded around right-wing circles). Seriously, #1 on HN and it's not even remotely about hacking. Flagged.
- begemot 14y agoI'm unmoved by this sentimental drivel, and I think your urging to "please pause for a moment and ask yourself why" is the most pompous thing I have read on HN.
- blhack 14y agoBecause its an overdone cliche? I think we've all heard this story 1000 times. I believe there was also recently a movie made about this story (or something like it. In the movie, it was an old man who was suicidal). Not to discount it, just saying that not making you cry is t that bizarre.
- tseabrooks 14y agoThis story just sold a book. Off topic question: I know many here aren't necessarily religious (Though some would say they are spiritual)... Do the non-religious among us still find value in the writing of overtly religious authors? I'm not interested in arguing about religion. I'm just curious if the HN crowd find value in the words of people with differing opinions.
- carterschonwald 14y agoA person's values and opinions are not inextricably tied to their religiosity. I'm about as irreligious as is possible to be, but two of the nicest most intelligent and genuinely nice guys I know on the planet are respectively a devout Mormon and a guy who's a serious evangelical Christian who does ethnic Chinese American rap and last I checked is planning to attend seminary. Point being, say no to monoculture, say yes to having interesting caring people who enrich those around them.
- ReidZB 14y agoAbsolutely. Religion is a personal view, one that everyone decides. I can't fault anyone for their belief. I loved this story and I generally love whatever I read on this site. For a non-religious person, death is an even sadder event than it is for the religious... because we view it as permanent.
- tseabrooks 14y agoRight. My comment originated by wondering, "How many HNers would buy his book". His book, that contains this story, is overtly religious in nature. Is this story enough to make you interested in his book even though you know some of the content will be in fierce opposition with your own beliefs?
- benjohnson 14y ago>>because we view it as permanent Given an infinite time and an infinite universes, there becomes a small possibility of existence again after death. (I'm Christian, so I admit that I may be a bit more optimistic than is warranted)
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- swombat 14y agoVery moving story. There's something about death, about the ending of life, about the closing of a life, that puts things in perspective, that makes things which you normally consider important (like charging for a cab ride) seem so petty it is ridiculous to even consider them, and that makes simple anodine events take on what I can only call a divine aspect (without any connection to traditional religion). These stories, these moments, are not just life, they're what life is about.
- pantaloons 14y ago"A life, Jimmy, you know what that is? It's the shit that happens while you're waiting for moments that never come."
- steventruong 14y agoSaw a slight different variation being shared on Facebook. Wonder why the difference if its a true story and who modified it...
- sehugg 14y agoThis story has been cut-and-pasted countless times: https://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=It+was+a+cowboy%E2%80%99s+life%2C+a+life+for+someone+who+wanted+no+boss.#hl=en&sclient=psy-ab&q=%22It+was+a+cowboy%E2%80%99s+life%2C+a+life+for+someone+who+wanted+no+boss.%22&oq=%22It+was+a+cowboy%E2%80%99s+life%2C+a+life+for+someone+who+wanted+no+boss.%22&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&gs_l=serp.3...19135.19702.0.20013.2.2.0.0.0.0.83.158.2.2.0...0.0.VcCM72ZgD00&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.r_qf.,cf.osb&fp=8316e992ae23057e&biw=1125&bih=727 https://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&#...
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- ChrisSteel 14y agoFor anyone who can't get to the site (I guess a bandwidth issue), you can get the article off google cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:wznsub_hiJwJ:www.zenmoments.org/the-cab-ride-ill-never-forget/&hl=en&prmd=imvns&strip=1 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:wznsub_...
- pjmlp 14y agoNice story
- iamdann 14y agoEvery year I grow older brings a new understanding of the concept of nostalgia. Driving through an old neighborhood, even just 5 or 10 years later, can hit like a ton of bricks. I can't even imagine what that taxi ride must have been like for her.
- StacyC 14y agoThat's exactly what occurred to me as I read the story. I graduated from college 20 years ago, and a few years back I drove through the old neighborhoods there and something just blasted me in the gut, or heart, or something. A flood of memories of friends and lovers and struggles and parties and fun and hurt and everything. What is that? Is it a realization of time passed, or opportunities missed, never to be available to us again? I can't imagine what it would be life after 80 years or so, and knowing that the door of life is closing quickly. Wow. Didn't mean to wax sentimental but I do love these ideas.
- timjahn 14y ago"Didn't mean to wax sentimental" Don't be ashamed. It's appreciated.
- thekungfuman 14y agoWeird coincidence; by the end of the story something had gotten in my eyes. Excuse me.
- taylonr 14y agoYeah, it's either really dusty or someone in the office is cutting onions.
- cpt1138 14y agoSeems like the tl;dw version of "Trip to Bountiful" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090203/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090203/
- razibog 14y agoThis made me burst out in tears. I rarely post here, but i felt this had to be said.
- anateus 14y agoWhat I took away from the story wasn't so much related to death, but rather its great visceral conveying of the point of the golden rule. The author says he treated her like he would want his mother to be treated. Many of us apply these sorts of rules, but we tend to do it much more rigorously with people close to us, because they are already more similar, and thus fit easier within the "do unto others" formulation (whether you use the positive or negative). It isn't great moments that catch us unaware as he says, it's that our life is a constant stream of such moments, usually unbeknownst to us. It's only occasionally that we realize the sort of impact we have on those around us. This story reminds me to continue applying these principles (within certain limits, the golden rule isn't a moral panacea) to every interaction, including the most incidental. The feelings expressed in the story are exactly the sort from which I derive my compassion and which I use as the intuitive component of my ethical reasoning. It reminds me to consider the side-effects of not just my actions, but also how I express my internal states to others.
- joeblau 14y agoThank you for the tl;dr review.
- pbreit 14y agoI always preferred "The Platinum Rule": Treat others as _they_ would like to be treated.
- scarmig 14y agoThe Platinum Rule, however, derives from the the Golden Rule. The reason to treat others as they would like to be treated is because (1) you want others to treat you as you want to be treated and (2) you should do unto others etc.
- PakG1 14y agoThat rule breaks down if it isn't qualified. What if the way they want to be treated isn't good for them? Especially in the case of immature people (and especially immature children). A simple example: always giving a kid a ton of candy whenever they want is hardly treating them well. How we should treat others is rarely an easy-to-discern topic. Lot of room for error there. We could say, "oh, but it's assuming they know what they're doing; or, oh, it's assuming they're a normal functioning person; etc". But the fact is, in life, a lot of people don't know what they're doing. They struggle with their relationships, their finances, and their very purpose of life. Whether it's a high school sophomore desperate for friends or a successful, rich guy with a mid-life crisis, we all have moments of weakness where we make irrational decisions and have irrational desires. Building on that point, further complicating matters is that people often don't know what they want, often including how they want to be treated. Oh, we know it usually means that people want respect, love, money, happiness, whatever. But what does it mean at a tactical level that actually gives us the insight for how to treat them well? Was my mom really jealous of me getting a box of cookies for a friend instead of her (long story), or did she just wish we could hang out more together before I left again for my new home? Well, turns out that although she was jealous of the cookies, she didn't care about the cookies at all. She wanted to spend time with me. Now, how is a normal person who sucks at conflict resolution supposed to pick up on that? It took me 30 minutes of talking with her. I really think that this rule is useless, unless one is some kind of prophet who can see into people's innermost hearts. It offers little real-world tactical advice. You might argue that the Golden Rule doesn't either, but I'd say it's much easier to implement, and much more difficult to screw up. And as the other guy notes, this Platinum Rule would derive from the Golden Rule anyway.
- VMG 14y agoand HN's signal-to-noise ratio is lowered once again
- SkyMarshal 14y agoAgreed. Flag it.
- benologist 14y agoThis doesn't look like spam at all.... https://www.google.com/search?q=Because+I+drove+the+night+shift%2C+my+cab+became+a+moving+confessional.+Passengers+climbed+in%2C+sat+behind+me+in+total+anonymity%2C+and+told+me+about+their+lives.+I+encountered+people+whose+lives+amazed+me%2C+ennobled+me%2C+and+made+me+laugh+and+weep https://www.google.com/search?q=Because+I+drove+the+night+sh....
- SatvikBeri 14y agoThis is by the actual author though, at least according to http://www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/c/cabbie.htm http://www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/c/cabbie.htm
- mortenjorck 14y agoI'm going to guess this story has been Mike Daisey'd. The author quite likely did work as a cabbie, did pick up an elderly woman on her final trip to hospice care, and did make an unexpected detour around town to look at some landmarks from her life. It probably also happened in the middle of the day, only took about half an hour, and the patient probably didn't say "You gave an old woman a little moment of joy," because she fell asleep near the end of the ride. This is sad, because, just like Mike Daisey's story, there's plenty of value in what really transpired, and by exaggerating it, it loses its believability. By becoming overly sentimental, bordering on mawkish, it loses the impact that a frank, thoughtful reflection on the actual event could have had.
- chimeracoder 14y ago> By becoming overly sentimental, bordering on mawkish, it loses the impact that a frank, thoughtful reflection on the actual event could have had. Or it reflects how the event happened to him, as opposed to how the event just happened. When writing narrative essays, remember that truth is subjective, and you have a choice between being loyal to how it impacted the narrator and how it 'objectively happened'. If you want the latter, you'll just end up with an overdetermined logfile. I don't know what parts of David Sedaris's stories are true, and I don't care - all I know is that some of them are incredibly powerful emotionally, and that man sure knows how to nail the ending of a story.
- horsehead 14y agoVery touching story. I got a chance to ride with a taxi driver for a night one time -- those guys have really interesting jobs. It's kind of like being a cop, except without carrying the gun (Though i think some do carry). Never know who you'll pick up for a ride.
- rg31415 14y agoI feel as though he should have taken the money from her. There was nobody to leave her money to.
- JshWright 14y agoI'm fortunate to have the opportunity to interact with many people in a similar way. I'm a volunteer EMT with the ambulance service in my town, with several 'assisted living' facilities in our district. My rough guess would be that 25-30% of the folks we take to the hospital are in the last year of their life, and likely will spend the rest of their days in the facility where we picked them up (with occasional 'field trips' to the ER). While it's popular to complain about these sorts of calls (they certainly lack the excitement of a car wreck, or the glamour of saving a child), I generally enjoy them. Even in the grips of dementia, many of these people have fascinating stories to tell. We're stuck together in the back of the truck for 20 minutes... I can either get a head start on my paperwork, or I can engage them in conversation. In the past month, I've met a WW2 bomber pilot (who flew in a pathfinder squadron) and a former Rockette (plus a schoolteacher, a librarian, a surveyor, and several others I'm sure I've forgotten). I learned something from each of them (well... most of them... grumpy old people are still grumpy...). The statement "I just try to treat my passengers the way I would want my mother treated," really rang home for me. I've heard that same sentiment (practically verbatim, just s/passengers/patients/) from several providers, all of whom I regard very highly. I think it's one of the best predictors of someone's ability as an EMS provider. While I know a few extremely capable medics who have a lousy bedside manner, every medic I know who seems to genuinely care about their patients is a top-notch medical provider.
- timjahn 14y agoThanks for sharing and contributing in a positive way to this post, and the overall story. Beats all the other grumps down below complaining about how this has nothing to do with hacking or technology. I think the grumps should start thinking about where they'd want the cab driver to drive them during those two hours.
- begemot 14y agoAs long as we are dictating what other people should be thinking about here is a quote from the late great James Baldwin I think you should mull over. 'Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel...the mask of cruelty'
- euphoria83 14y agoYou made me cry.
- re_todd 14y agoAs the great Jack Handey of Deep Thoughts once said, "It takes a big man to cry, but it takes a bigger man to laugh at that man."
- rickmode 14y agoMeta question: how is this related to hacker news (related to technology or science)?
- lotharbot 14y agoThe guidelines quite clearly state that HN stories don't have to be related to tech/science: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html "On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." on the other hand: "If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic." Now that you know the criteria, I leave it to you to draw your own conclusions as to whether this story belongs.
- alecco 14y agoThis cheap feel-good fictional story did not gratify my intellectual curiosity. And it sparked a religion flamewar in the comments.
- sophacles 14y agoYou know what doesn't gratify my intellectual curiosity? Stories about beginner level Vim, or stories about programming iPhone apps. The first because I am a fairly advanced vim user. The later because I don't really care about iPhone dev. Perhaps that means they don't belong HN. Or perhaps it means that not every story on this site exists for me. Many of the stories here do qualify for my intellectual curiosity. Many stories I would like to see discussion on are not discussed, and many that are discussed I don't care about. Perhaps I should go to every story about basic Vim and declare that they just don't belong here because my intellectual curiosity is not properly being pandered. Or perhaps everyone should grow up a bit and not chicken-little every story they don't like but which gets major points. It always baffles me how: If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. a statement that implies in itself that it isn't the end-all-be-all definitive rule, gets turned into some sort of hard rule. And that hard rule application somehow ignores the fact that some people find different things interesting, if those things disagree with the reader's personal taste.
- asciimo 14y ago"But none touched me more than a woman I picked up late one August night." <Snigger>
- darksaga 14y agoReal or not, it's still a very powerful piece of literature. I think there's an underlying theme to the story - a lot of our history is being lost or superseded by the internet. There's so many things we have left to learn from "The Greatest Generation" yet when given the opportunity, most would rather downplay the story, or simply go back their smartphones social networks.
- wildmXranat 14y agoI'm not going to lie, I teared up half way through the article. Rather than contemplate the fact of it being real or not, I'll spend some time drawing more meaningful conclusions.
- MPSimmons 14y agoDamnit. There's not supposed to be crying at Hacker News.
- MPSimmons 14y agoDamnit. There's not supposed to be crying at Hacker News.
- ahnunahki 14y agoA little disappointed that he didn't get to fuck her.
- gwillen 14y agoThis is the second time I've seen this story this week, and this version is subtly different from the previous one I saw. This is making me wonder whether either version of the story actually happened. I wish I remembered where I saw the other one.
- emperorcezar 14y agoI've seen it about a dozen times in a dozen different forms in as many years.
- calciphus 14y agoIt's reads like a creative writing piece, and is taken from a book about living with the prayer of Saint Francis. I don't believe it's meant to have literally happened, so much as to convey a lesson.
- mynameishere 14y agoIf you ever sat through a sermon by a competent preacher, they're just loaded with scripted stories like this. No cab driver is going to throw away a day's pay out of sentiment.
- KVFinn 14y agoWow, that was way better than I expected. Damn onions.
- siculars 14y agoBest story I've heard in a bit. Thank you for sharing.
- jwdunne 14y agoIt's an incredible story and it moved me greatly. It also appears to have moved many more people around the globe once again. I've just noticed my mum share this exact story on Facebook and she's very far removed from Hacker News (it appears to be part of a note).
- pcfree 14y agoI'm certain that I read this or a similar short story in high school but i can't remember much else about it. it's funny how the short stories and books i read in high school are so much more recallable than things learned in the other classes.
- ricardobeat 14y agoWhat an interesting coincidence. Just minutes ago I watched a short film with a similar story: https://vimeo.com/40846220 https://vimeo.com/40846220