Slowdown?
Not too long ago, everything seemed pretty rosy with confidence soaring through the roof that it would remain so until at least the London Olympics in 2012. Now can anyone be sure? The signs are not too dissimilar to those in 1989 when for no apparent reason, London never celebrated Christmas but didn’t even realise it. The London taxi trade certainly did and my outstanding memory of that year was trying to get on the rank at St Pauls on a wet Friday evening, when in reality it should have been almost impossible to get a cab! I put on foul hoping the rank would move and was "caught" by a passing policeman who issued me with some sort of ticket - can you remember a time when there was no cctv, just police! Fortunately, after sending a begging letter, it was cancelled with a curt "next time we could take further action" note.
   Now, with the well-publicised housing crisis in the US that no one thought could affect us – until Northern Rock came along - we seem to be looking at least at some kind of slowdown.
   Fortunately for us, it could affect street work rather than that on the radio because unlike last time when it was a simple matter of account clients telling their staff to grab cabs off the street, with all the benefits in the form of information they now have at their fingertips from DaC for every trip they give us, giving us up would mean that large accounts would have to bring in extra

Call Sign thanks…
Call Sign isn’t run by magic. It doesn’t just appear with 40 pages of hopefully interesting material for you to look at each month and I really would like to thank everyone who makes it what it is. All my regular contributors from the trade’s finest cartoonist by the proverbial mile, Jery Craig to Richard Potter, who besides testing different fuels on behalf of our readers, is also prepared to give his views on life and…well everything! Then there’s the mysterious Sunset Strip whose memory goes back to the early years when we were plain ODRTS and known as Oddrats! What about the notorious Kupkake, sometimes known to his family as David Kupler and whose poems match the trade’s ailments to a tee – except that the trade doesn’t operate in rhyme!
   There’s John Addis, who has been keeping Call Sign up-to-date with developments – or should that be NON-developments - at the Limehouse Link and of course Jenny in California, who has revealed some rather intimate details of her private affair with a DaC driver! Because of a shortage of space in the November issue, I delayed the continuation of that story for a month and was inundated with emails asking why, because they were concerned that they’d never know the ending. Most were driver’s wives, but one or two surprising names of actual drivers also complained. I won’t mention their call signs for fear of embarrassing them!
   Speaking of driver’s wives, there’s Poppy, Call Sign’s back seat driver and guardian of our

morals, whose American slant to life suggests that you shouldn’t do it unless you are certain you can get away with it!
    Vince Chin runs the Call Sign Online section and has been with me since issue number one and whose knowledge of all things PC and Internet are second to none. And Alan Nash; his Nash’s Numbers have too been with me since that first issue. There are still some out there who haven’t emailed Alan for his Useful Information Document (UID) that providing you are on email, is free and contains pages and pages of useful info for you to keep in the cab.
   Let’s not forget the man whose musical taste keeps you whistling in most issues, Mickey Lappin and our Eating Out volunteers whose thankless job it is to go to some lovely restaurants, tuck into food and wine and leave without having to pay a penny - just to let you know whether you too should go there – and pay!
   Of course, the hundreds of drivers who write into Call Sign either with letters or articles and all of whom are happy to put their names to them, where would I be without them? No made up stuff in these pages…!
   My foreign staff in the form of Bob "ooh la la" Woodford leaves me with the last but not least name, the man who does my daytime running around, interviewing and photography, Alan Green. Life would be so much more difficult if I had to do it all myself.
   As I said at the beginning, the mag doesn’t run by magic, it’s just hard work so my thanks also to everybody, including Board members and the Chairman himself, some of whom don’t always fancy writing but do it to save hearing me moan!
   And the most important people of all - those who just read it but consistently say nice things when they see me on the road! My thanks to you, it still means a lot to me. My apologies if I have missed anybody out and to everyone, the happiest and healthiest of New Years…

Alan Fisher
callsignmag@aol.com