Paul
I tell you what, there are some things during a flying work trip to Leatherhead that you don’t expect to be standout moments. Your plans are usually to travel to the office, sit in the office, find the hotel, eat, sleep, wake up, travel to the office, sit in the office, go home.
And that’s all I assumed I’d do. Instead, my perspective of life widened in the space of two taxi journeys from the office to my hotel and then back to the office. 40 minutes of perspective-changing, taxi-riding goodness crammed in to a 24 hour window.
Paul has six children. He’s been running Mint Taxis of Leatherhead for nearly a decade with his wife.
He makes ends meet, just. He doesn’t get a lot of time to himself. He sleeps when people don’t need a taxi and his kids don’t need him — which is rarely.
Life isn’t perfect for Paul. But he has his family. He has his business. He has his freedom. And he knows his stuff about taxis.
I use Uber a lot in Manchester, rather than local taxi companies. At the end of the day, no one beats Uber for price.
But after meeting Paul, and getting to know him, I started to realise that the more I support companies — like Uber — that are attempting to dominate the market and run smaller firms out of business, the more damage I do to the lives of people desperate to cling to their freedom.
Who am I — who are we — to take that away from them?
Support local business. Uber can take over everywhere else in the world.
Thanks for reading Chapter 201!
