Sunday, January 6, 2008

Drivers Come and Go

Well, as I think I mentioned, we let our last driver go right before we went to Hong Kong. I chronicled a lot of the reasons that we had to let him go over the past few months.

Yesterday, driver number four started. Once again, there was an auspicious start, and once again, it was not a match made in heaven.

Tim had him meet her at work yesterday and bring the car back home. I saw him laying in the car sleeping during the afternoon, which is not altogether unexpected or uncommon.

At 5:30, we were getting ready to go to meet Tim at her work and go out for dinner. The driver told me through the nanny that the car battery was dead. I verified that it wouldn't start. My first thought was that he had the car radio running while he was laying down napping. Except for the fact that he had managed to let down all the winders (electronically of course), there was no other proof he caused the problem. Of course, it would be quite the coincidence that the battery happened to die the day he started. So we had him take a taxi and pick up our van from Tim's brothers and go pick her up at work.

Tim told the driver to meet her here at 12:30 this afternoon to take her to work. When she went outside at 1:00, he was not there. She called his house and an older woman, probably his mother, answered and said that he had a flat tire. The woman informed Tim that he couldn't call her because he couldn't afford a phone.

Well, unlike baseball, there are not a preset number of strikes that you get as a driver in our family. In this case, two was more than enough. Tim called the agency and fired him.

I am seeing a bit of a pattern. The first and third drivers, while deeply and utterly flawed in their ability to do their jobs, each lasted a few months. The second and fourth drivers, however, lasted less than 24 hours each. As our next driver will be number five, I expect I'll have a few months to share his exploits with you.

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