About Cab Drivers: They're People. I'm Pretty Sure.

About a month ago, I walked out of the train station near the end of the commuter rush, about 8:30, and stepped into a cab. I said "good morning" and offered my destination, and the driver said, "You're about the fortieth person I've picked up this morning, and you're the first one who has said good morning."

Now, if I haven't mentioned it before, I'm the least social person in the United States, and no one who has ever met me (or even spoken to me on the telephone) would accuse me of having a social grace to my name. But isn't "good morning" automatic? Shouldn't it be?

To make matters worse, the driver asked me a moment later where I was from. I named a nearby suburb. "No," he said, "I mean what country are you from originally?" When I said that I'd been born and raised right here, he asked, "Have you lived overseas?"

I said that I hadn't and he said--really--"So where did you learn to say 'good morning' to the driver?"

Is that who we are? Really? A country of hundreds of millions of people who can't even be bothered to say good morning, who don't even see the cab driver or the man who sells us our newspapers or the woman who serves our coffee? Is it that we don't value people in certain occupations enough to really look at them, or is it even bigger than that? Do we see other people at all?

My cab experience this evening would indicate perhaps not. Traffic was dense and I got out of my cab about a block before the train station and walked. About halfway there, I passed a man standing next to a cab with the back door open. The driver of the cab was walking along the line of stopped cabs with a large bill in his hand, trying to get change from one of his colleagues. As I walked, I saw him approach 2 or 3 other cabs without success, so when I drew near to the man standing next to his cab--obviously the owner of the large bill the driver couldn't change--I asked, "Do you need change?"

He looked at me for a minute and then said, rather tersely, "Well, my cabbie is already trying to get change, so no, I don't."

I looked at his "cabbie", who was standing at the window of yet another cab waiting to see whether that driver could produce change. He smiled at me and held up a hand in a sort of "just a minute" gesture, understandably wanting me to wait until he found out whether his colleague had what he needed.

I waited.

The man whose money he was attempting to change stood there, looking a little put out and not acknowledging either one of us. I stood there thinking, "cabbie"? Maybe it's me. Maybe it's regional. Maybe "my cabbie" is a perfectly acceptable way to refer to a grown man making an honest living. But even if it is, I can't get my mind around how it's acceptable for the man with the large bills to dismiss an easy solution to the problem (me, standing there with the change he needed in my purse) and stand there watching "his cabbie" knock on windows along the row of parked cars trying to get him change.

Fortunately, the other driver--at least the third one he'd approached--had the change. The "cabbie" thanked the other driver. He brought the change back to his passenger, and then he thanked me, too.

So far as I could see, the passenger didn't thank anyone. Not the driver who produced the change, not the stranger who stopped to offer help unsolicited, and certainly not the "cabbie" who walked a line of cars at the stoplight searching for his change.