Simply said, I got tired of all of this. For these past two years I drove a day shift. At night I went to school for retraining. So I'm changing careers again. I'm leaving a job without a future to find a job with one. I will say this, just once: "The Night Cabbie won't be back."
The Night Cabbie column has been up and running for eight years, first with the then Hearst-run Examiner and now with the Hearst-run Chronicle. Nobody knew who exactly the Cabbie was, leading to all sorts of guessing games (we’ve always wondered if any of the multitudes of cab drivers we’ve had in the city was him and if so, hopefully it wasn’t on one of those nights that involved Jager) but once a week, a column would appear relating whatever adventures he had with any sort of comment he’d add to it. The writing was gritty and minimal and all sorts of slice-of-life-ish but frankly, we always thought the column was a better idea than an actual column. Like a lot of writing in that style, it was either hit or miss and we thought it was mainly miss; most of his stories left us wondering what the point was. But that could be just us- we’ve probably seen way too much Taxi Driver and were probably just disappointed in the fact that the columns weren’t full of prose about how the scum needed to be washed off the city streets and how hot Jody Foster is. Regardless, the column was a pretty unique one and a change of pace from John Carroll’s cat-columns and Leah Garchik’s gossip columns about people we’ve never heard of. It also leaves the Chron with one less columnist than they had before. We're sure they're right on it.
