Kristabella: Full of Snark Since 1977

Posted By Kristabella on April 30, 2012

On Saturday night, my friend Jessica and I went downtown to some trendy bar in River North to help celebrate her sister’s birthday. It was actually really fun. The bar was small, yet quaint. And they had the most amazing cocktails, including the Vanilla Sky, of which I think I had 3 too many. It was vanilla vodka, strawberry puree and champagne. Potent and delicious.

So after about 17 of these drinks, we decided it was time to go home. We are old and we both needed to get sleep. Little did we know how very potent these drinks were and how very hungover we would spend all of Sunday.

We hopped in a cab and shared it up north, since we don’t live too far from each other. We told the driver that we were heading north to Irving. I paid attention, since there was a shit ton of traffic on the Ontario feeder ramp, and I wanted to see if it was an accident. It wasn’t, so Jess and I checked our phones and chatted.

About 20 minutes later I happened to look up to see where we were. I noticed that we were passing the White Sox stadium and were on the Dan Ryan, south of 35th Street. In the exact opposite direction of where we needed to go.

I yelled at the cab driver to turn around, that he was going totally the wrong way, and that we were not paying for this cab ride. I was pissed. I mean, Irving is a MAJOR street. Even if you may not have known the cross street, you, as a Chicago cab driver, should know that Irving is north of the Loop. I think my suburbanite brother and sister both even know this.

He finally got us close to where we needed to be and we got out. I flat out refused to pay. We were literally in the car for an hour. For a 10 mile drive. After midnight.

We started walking to an intersection so that I could catch yet another cab to my house, since we were near Jess’s house. What we weren’t expecting was the cab driver to get out of his cab, leaving it running in the street, to chase us down for money. I then drunkenly lambasted him in the middle of the street that we were not paying for his lack of knowledge and our unfortunate jaunt to the South Side.

Then he threatened to call the police. And since we were both shitfaced and wanting to get far, far away from this man, we paid him like $10 and made him leave. Which he did, thankfully.

My next cab driver was much nicer and knew where he was going. He also told me we shouldn’t have run off without paying, since he did take us to where we needed to go. And I’m like “yeah, except he was probably planning to originally take us to some ditch outside the city near Indiana to kill us, so I didn’t really want to pay for that.”

It appears I am no longer the cab driver whisperer. But I would like more of those delicious drinks.

Categories: A Dash of the Crazy, A Day in the Life of Me, Chi-town, Taxicab Confessions
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