New York Minute

There cannot possibly be a breed of person more aware of how valuable their time is than a New Yorker. I discovered this about seven minutes after my arrival at JFK airport when I dared to get into a cab merely knowing the street address of the apartment I was staying at and not also the nearest intersection.

I told the cab driver my address - 343 South 5th Street, Brooklyn*. In my experience with cabs across the globe, this is generally sufficient information for a successful journey. Apparently not.

"What's the nearest cross-street?" the guy barks at me from the front seat.

"What?" I ask.

"The nearest cross-street. Brooklyn is huge. What's the nearest cross-street?"

"I uh... don't know."

"What?! Whaddaya mean ya don't know?! How do you expect me to get you there without knowing the nearest cross street?"

"Well don't you have a GPS or a street directory or something?" He ignores this.

"What's the nearest cross-street?"

"I already TOLD you, I don't know the name of the nearest cross-street."

"Well how do you expect me to get you there?"

I'm beginning to sense a certain Waiting for Godot quality to the conversation, so I mumble that I have been there before (over a year ago, mind you) and if I study my map of Brooklyn I might be able to recall the nearest cross-street. This almost placates him until I foolishly suggest we begin to drive to Brooklyn (this altercation has thus far occurred in the taxi bay at JFK in front of hundreds of other people).

"Sir," the guy says, like I'm missing a chromosome. "If you don't know where you're going there's no point in starting the journey."

"I DO know where I'm going," I almost shriek in frustration. "343 South 5th Street Brooklyn!"

"And what's the name of the nearest cross-street?"

"Goddammit!" I yell. (I think this qualifies me as an official New Yorker now). So I bury my head in my little pocket guide of New York trying to find where the hell I'm supposed to go. The cab driver is not content with our impromptu performance being a two-hander, and so he decides to recruit more performers into the show by leaning out the window and shouting to the taxi-queue manager, "This guy wants to go to Brooklyn but he doesn't know the nearest cross-street."

"What the hell?" the queue-manager says, staring at me as though I've just announced that I think it perfectly reasonable to attend a christening in a gimp-suit.

"Yeah," the cab-driver says, "how does he expect me to take him somewhere if he doesn't know where he wants to go?"

I'm really getting pissed-off now. I'm not really in a very good mood to begin with. I've just spent 24 hours in transit - 21 on a plane and 3 in customs queues - after having not slept my last night in Australia because I was too excited. This, compounded by the fact that the two nights prior to my departure were spent getting completely written-off means that I haven't had deep, non-hungover sleep since the previous Thursday. So when this guy starts leaning out his window shouting to all and sundry about the foolish Australian cluttering up the back seat of his cab with the audacity to request transport to an address without having an intimate knowledge of the destination borough, something inside me snapped.

"HEY," I said. "I've TOLD you already I want to go to 343 South-5th Street in BROOKLYN."

"And what's the nearest..."

"Do you have a GPS?"

"What's the nearest..."

"DO you HAVE a GPS?!"

"Yes sir I do."

"Then I WANT TO GO TO 343 SOUTH-5th STREET IN BROOKLYN."

There was a sigh, some typing on a GPS, and about ten seconds later we were on our way, which was  a little ironic considering we had just spent five minutes immobile in the taxi bay because, to the cab-driver, his time was so freakin' important that he would be better off demanding that I somehow conjure the information he wanted from the ether rather than spend the three nanoseconds it would have taken to type the info into his goddam GPS.

So New York operates under the premise of hyper-efficiency. Everything from food to transport to dry-cleaning is undertaken with the minimum of fuss and pretense. Conversation between customers and servers is generally kept civil yet basic, none of this pesky "how are you today" or sometimes even "please" or "thank you" to waste everyone's time. Go to a diner and you'll be given a menu slightly thicker than a phone book. You can order anything you want on it and reasonably expect it to be at your table before you've had time to warm up your seat. Trains zip around on the subway so regularly they may as well install a high-speed conveyer-belt instead.

And to be honest, it's probably just as well. New York is, of course, freakin' ENORMOUS (well, to a little ol' country boy from 'Straya it is) and the city would grind to a halt if everyone spent all day naval-gazing while waiting for a train or engaging in prolonged social niceties every time they wanted a cup of coffee. Even still, it can sometimes be a bit intimidating. As such, I try to adopt the philosophy of "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em".

I think of my experience with the cab-driver outside JFK airport as my initiation.

*Lest you think I'm clueless enough in this age of electronic-identity-theft to publish my address, this is a fake address. Obviously I told the cab-driver my real address though (duh.)