Taxi Driver Stories

Taxi driver story | John Bartrick | July 15th, 2000

Hello everyone,

I thought it would be worth sharing an experience I had a few weeks ago. After attending an Aston workshop weekend in Athens I began to make my way home. With my head still full of the ideas concerning IIC (which Steve Mann had helped generate), I found myself in the middle of a generic paradigm. No, I didn't call the police but I did pull out my notebook at the first opportunity and try and reconstruct the interaction.

The generic structure in question is that of anecdote, (Plum 1988, Rothery 1990) consisting of (Abstract) ^ (Orientation), ^ Remarkable Event ^ Reaction ^ (Coda), bracketed elements are optional.

Apologies for ignoring most transcription conventions, I'm just starting the IIC module! The dialogue is translated from Greek.

J= John and T=Taxi-driver.
J has just got into a taxi and is perspiring profusely.


J: Oh you've got air-conditioning, that's nice.
T: Well, you can't work in Athens in the summer without it.
J: No, that's right, it's very hot, especially these last two days. The really hot weather seems to have come early this year.
T: No, not really, from 20th June to 20th July is the hottest time, mmm (Orientation) I'll tell you what happened to me one time I was at the airport. And there were two Arabs I put their bags in the boot they'd just arrived. So they get in and I didn't have air-conditioning then you know it was 35 degrees and the windows were open everything open and when I looked at them they were shivering, like this brrrrrr (laughs) (Remarkable event 1).
J: oh right (Reaction 1).
T: and I thought - why the hell are they shivering, what the hell's their problem, and I thought
J: they were cold
T: they were cold. What the hell was their problem.
J: Yeah I suppose where they come from -
T: So one of them says he waves his hand at the window and he's shivering and says, close it close it.
J: he was cold.
T: And I'm sitting here and what the hell's going on here and I'm sweating like a pig and I close the windows (Remarkable event 2)
J: oh yeah it just goes to show - (Reaction 2).
T: so then one of them points at the heater and says
J: oh no he wanted - (Reaction 3)
T: Put the heater on. What the hell? (Remarkable Event 3)
J: yeah I suppose they're used to, you know - (Reaction 3 again).
T: Yeah they'd been on the plane for hours and where they came from it's 50 degrees or something (Coda)
J: yeah that's funny!

Firstly I hope nobody is offended by the mention of Arabs. We could substitute it with 'people who live in a country hotter than Greece' but then it wouldn't be authentic.

Secondly the multiple occurrence of 'remarkable event' reminded me of the SPRE model and how as a general framework these paradigms are useful, but it would be simplistic to assume that a text is made up of one 'S', followed by one 'P', then one 'R' and finally one 'E. (see Foundation Module). These paradigms seem flexible.

Thirdly this incident brought to mind the Lexical Studies type question of 'What does hot mean?' The above dialogue seems to support the idea that meaning is culturally specific and context can be everything!

Next my mind turned to the possibly untapped research area of taxicab interaction. My personal experience suggests that regardless of the language used there is a remarkable similarity in the 'shape' (Give me a better word, please) of the interaction.

Finally I thought I'd share this with you all because of its topical nature, Greece is experiencing a heat wave. I also just thought it was funny!

Wow! All this from an Aston study weekend, cheers Steve!

Bye for now

John

Re: Taxi driver stories | Pinkie | July 18th, 2000

Nice story, nice analysis, lots of interesting questions raised! Something that occurs to me is whether the taxi driver is embroidering the truth: no doubt this occurred to you, and of course if you hadn't supplied positive feedback you'd have stopped the dialogue in its tracks. Maybe the next time the taxi driver tells the story he'll add a fourth "remarkable event" (e.g. the Arabs don woolly sweaters and pull out a thermo of hot soup). How many remarkable events will he be able to pile on before he oversteps the accepted limits? What sort of signals might listeners choose to give once they suspect that they're being taken for a ride? There must be parodies of this type of thing.

By the way, this mention of taxi cab interaction reminds me of an interview with a taxi driver that I read in the paper a couple of weeks ago: he said that significant conversation very rarely arose if he had more than one passenger. And if he had only one passenger, he could tell from the very first elements of the exchange (generally "feelers" about the traffic, or the weather) whether to keep going or not. Another by-the-way: here in my region of Spain (Galicia), there's a very successful candid-camera-type program involving silly situations in a taxi (the driver is an actor, the passenger the dupe) - for example, the driver says a new law means that passengers are to be charged by their weight, and hands the passenger some bathroom scales. The program is actually very well done: the dupe is never the object of senseless humiliation or rudeness, as often seems to be the case in programs of this type.

A similar "two-people-trapped" situation is barber/customer dialogue, no? Not so similar: dentist/patient "dialogue"!

Finally, a "meta" question. If someone posts to the list without explicitly inviting response (as in this very interesting message from John), should we respond? Is no response negative feedback?

Pinkie
Spain

Re: Taxi driver stories | John Bartrick | July 19th, 2000

Pinkie,

Thanks for the feedback and for pointing out the possibility of taxi passengers being taken for a ride (!).

Just to pick up on one of the points you mentioned I think I would interpret a lack of response as a form of negative feedback. Another participant mentioned to me that when nobody followed up her message she assumed her comments had been irrelevant or she had missed the mark in some way. This can be both misleading and demotivating.

Again this raises the question of email discussion lists as a specific type of communication. This discussion group raised some of the issues back in April / May and suggested that what could be interpreted as apathy or "lurking" may in some cases in fact be self-consciousness resulting in a fear of "going public."

That's one angle certainly, but I think we need some sort of confirmation that what we have said has at least been heard if not agreed with. It has made me think how as participants in other types of interaction, face-to-face/ telephone/ some types of written correspondence, the receiver has a responsibility to respond. I hadn't really thought of this element of obligation before.

Another slightly misleading aspect of email discussion lists is the fact that they do not show the feedback that the sender has received to his/her personal address. Three participants have responded to my message so I'm not feeling ignored.

Thanks for your comments

Bye
John

Re: Taxi driver stories | Keith Richards | July 21st, 2000

Hi,

Thanks to John and Pinkie for their stories. Interesting stuff. Coupla thoughts:

The bit that really grabbed me was the second exchange:

J:   No, that's right, it is very hot, especially these last two days. The really hot weather seems to have come early this year.
T: No, not really, from 20th June to 20th July is the hottest time.

So much for the preference for agreement! Schegloff's work in that area pointed to the fact that in American (and, as it happens, UK) talk there is a preference for agreement. So the response in this case would probably be something like, "Yes. Mind you, it seems to be getting more and more typical for this time of year" or "Yes, but it's hard to tell the difference between July and August nowadays" (and then bang on about global warming). I speculate, but whatever the actual response a straightforward "no" would be the most dispreferred form.   The "not really" is, I suppose, a bit of mitigation, but not much. This is an interest point of comparison between Greek and English interaction.

My own reading of the story is that the taxi driver has got all the details right except for the shivering. I lived in Riyadh for three years and, like the rest of us, the locals spent so much time in air conditioned rooms that they would never shiver in 35 degrees of heat (in fact many people regarded my wife and me as freaks because we didn't sleep with the air conditioner on). However, what irritated many people were newcomers who hadn't adjusted to the air-conditioning culture and who opened their car window to "cool down" before the air conditioner had properly kicked in (this was back at the start of the eighties when air conditioners were fairly primitive compared to today's models). I think that the Greek taxi driver's passengers shut the windows and pointed to the "heater" because they wanted the air conditioner on.   Nowhere near as good a story, though, and the point of telling a story is that it should be interesting, so when you have your interpretation why not add a bit of shivering for dramatic effect?

Pinkie's point about a response to a posting is interesting. I agree with him that if the posting is the first part of an adjacency pair (e.g. a question or an invitation for responses) then a lack of response might be taken as "dispreferred". However, if it's not then I guess you're in a grey area and have to look for subtler signals. I took it that John's "I thought I'd share this with you" and "I also just thought it was funny" suggest that this is just a case of passing on an interesting anecdote, which may or may not prompt a response. The "cheers Steve" at the end also closes it down more by addressing an individual. This is another interesting issue.   Never stops, does it?

Have a good weekend (or, for participants in the Middle East, I hope you had a good weekend).

Cheers

Keith

Re: Taxi driver stories | Tom Bloor | July 25th, 2000

I liked Keith's explanation of the Greek taxi story and I am sure it is right. At first, I thought it was just taxi-driver bullshit because the coldest I remember ever being was in an air-conditioned oil company office in South Yemen; I had to go outside to thaw out but the Arabs seemed very happy with it.   Hot climate dwellers seem to have a greater tolerance of cold as a luxury. Contrariwise I once shared a sauna with a Pinkie from Kerala and he thought it was the worst kind of torture and fled after a couple of minutes. I'm sure Keith's explanation is right.

Tom Bloor

Re: Taxi driver stories | Pinkie | July 28th, 2000

Yes, Keith's interpretation (they wanted the air-conditioning on, not the heater) is eminently plausible: I stand corrected!

Pinkie
Spain

 

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