The Taxi Thread

[Ducked]

@Impaler

[quote=“Ducked”]I showed the guy a map, and he seemed to have no fucking clue what it was.

My strong impression was that the 2-dimensional representation of three dimensional geographic space was a concept that, for him, was a few thousand years too early.[/quote]
Wow, and I thought my experience must have been unusual. I was supposed to go to a friend’s house. I showed FOUR DIFFERENT CAB DRIVERS IN A ROW a map of where I wanted to go, which was RIGHT NEXT TO A MAJOR MRT STATION, and EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM had NO FUCKING CLUE of how to read a map, or what one was, or what the mysterious glowing machine with the picture with the squiggly lines on it was.

I finally gave up and called my friend, and he talked to the next cabbie to explain that it was in a common, well-known location and the cabbie didn’t have to worry about the strange foreigner with the magic box. Who promptly ran red lights, ran down pedestrians, and ran all the other vehicles off the road. I came out of the back of that cab 30 minutes later in a daze, wondering how the hell we’d survived the trip.

And that’s not even to get into the whole “maps in the MRT” thing. THIS IS THE FUCKING ORIENT, people, why can you not ORIENT your maps so that the same direction is at the top all the time!??!?!?!

I spent ten minutes figuring out which exit I was going to crawl out of, and which direction I’d have to turn from there to get where I was going. Then just as I was about to walk out, I noticed that the “north” arrow was pointed left-down-left.

Slightly off-topic but related, WTF is a “clockwise train”?

First saw this signage in the then-new station at Rende, but it has since metastased through the rail system like a Cancerous Chinglish Conundrum.

My best guess workaround was to think of the N-S double rail mainline as a Salvador Dali stylee clock face stretched the length of Taiwan, so that “up” trains were going N on the left of the clockface, and “down” trains were going S on the right of the clockface, but I think I’ve checked it in other places where clockwise trains show their face, and it doesn’t always work.

It also doesn’t work because on that model ALL trains are clockwise, which I suppose does work, but its a bit redundant.

I don’t think I’ve seen mention of an anti-clockwise train.

They don’t sell clockwork trains either, I checked.