Hallowe'en

12 hours. Straight. No breaks. No coffee. FML. There are however, 465 reasons to like that.

Best costume: A man dressed as a hot dog bun....and when I say he was dressed as a hot dog bun, I mean that he cut a hole in a small mattress and wore it around his neck. He claimed that he would go around hugging ladies and asking them if they wanted to be the hot dog for his bun.

Runners-up: 4 guys that looked like the Hanson brothers dressed as chippendales. A bonus for one of them  biffing it while running towards my cab. Also, 4 guys dressed as bananas. An AIESECer dressed as the tallest samurai that has ever existed. One gigantic blue elmo/grover. One mexican in a fat suit with a mullet.

Best costume by a taxi driver: A fat, old, east indian driver dressed up as a Dalmatian. Really no competition to speak of though.

Groups in my cab that I knew: 3.....one group consisting of a couple AIESECers, one group consisting of guys I play basketball with, and one group of people I went to high school with (I never pointed this out to them).

Tonight I became a hero to a small group who had been stranded at Moxie's. They had been there for over an hour and a half waiting for a cab. The wait time for most of the night was 45 minutes. They were really happy when I came and thanked me repeatedly. What they didn't know was that and hour and half earlier I had been sitting at Moxie's when they originally called. I gave them about 5 minutes to come out of the building and get into my cab, and when they didn't, I left....because it was insanely busy around town and I had no patience. However, I decided not to mention these minor details to them.

Almost had a fight over my cab. At one point there were about 50-100 people stranded outside Outlaws looking for a cab. One guy flagged me down and when we went to pick up his front we got drunk-attacked (this occurs when a drunk doesn't realize that there are already people in the cab and repeatedly pull on the door handle and wonder why it's locked. This occurs 3-4 times a shift for me). Thinking his ride home was in jeopardy, the guy in my cab jumped out and almost attacked the drunk. Thankfully his friends arrived and we left.

Good part of my job: girls who are actually nice. This usually takes place with my worst drunks of the night, and then there is one nice girl in the cab who is very nice and says 'please' and 'thank you' and gives in a little extra tip. Doesn't sound like much, but always makes the night a little better.

Even better part of my job: ladies....costumes.....short skirts. It seems that any ladies costume can be made better by the addition of a really short skirt. Did I have wandering eyes? Maybe.

Now, if you happen to leave your phone or wallet in my cab, it gets returned to the office where you can claim. However, if you leave an untouched 12-pack of Moosehead Lager, it gets moved to my fridge. I've decided that whoever left it thought I was a really good driver and that it was a tip. I'm pretty sure it was in there for the majority of the evening, and I was expecting one of my customers to snag it. However, it was still there at the end of the night and I felt no reason for me not to take it.

At the airport, waiting for a flight to a land, another driver comes over to talk to me and eventually the subject comes up and I say how I'm a student at the U of S. The other driver says 'I know, you're that Commerce student'. Apparently, a lot of other drivers know me but haven't actually met me. I'm the 'Commerce student'. I'm a pretty big deal, people know me.

Scariest moment of the evening: Driving home and finding out the hard way that going 80 around a slight curve in the road with really icy roads is a bad idea. No other cars were around to witness my 720, and my supreme driving skills kept it on the road. And with my Camaro finally changing from an awesome-machine into a death-machine, I can announce winter to have officially arrived.