GIVING CHILDREN BACK THEIR FUTURE WITH 'TREK PERU'
On arrival at Euston on Sunday evening, I got a taxi to take me home to St Johns Wood. As ever, a little conversation ensued. The DaC driver asked me what I had been doing and I told him I'd been training for my challenge. A magic thing then happened. At the end of the trip and after I gave him my fare, he gave me £5 towards the charity challenge. I was bowled over that a stranger would sponsor me. There are some good, generous people around. He suggested I wrote to you, knowing that you also support some children's charities. As a Dial-a-Cab customer of old, I would really appreciate some sort of sponsorship from yourselves. I assure you, it all really goes to the right place.
Thank you, in advance for your valued support. It means an enormous amount to me.
Tessa Solomon
London, NW8

On September 18, Tessa Solomon plans to begin a 50 kilometre trek along the Inca trail to Machu Picchu in Peru at the rate of 6 - 8 hours a day over four days at a height of up to 4200 metres (three times the height of Ben Nevis). Proceeds will be going to people with disabilities associated with Doctor Barnardo's and Kith & Kids. If you would like to help Tessa raise money, send a cheque to Tessa at Green Farm, Monewden, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP13 7DH made payable to Barnardo's Trek Peru...Ed

THE TALK OF LONDON
I would like to thank Tom Whitbread and his team for giving my wife and I the opportunity to have such a wonderful evening at 'The Talk of London' night-club, which must come highly recommended for a great value night out. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank Trevor Morris (F21) and his wife for taking my wife home as unfortunately my auto gear-lever had snapped just before meeting her! This circuit just never fails to provide a true gent.
Adrian Landau (T14)...via email

May I thank Tom Whitbread and the management at the Talk of London for such an excellent evening. On a rare occasion away from the children, I was able to wine and dine my female companion with a very tasty meal and colourful, entertaining cabaret. And the star of the evening Carl Wayne mentioned Dial-a-Cab several times during the course of the evening! My only regret was having to leave the partying earlier than planned 'cos our child-minder objected to us dancing the night away while she was stuck indoors! Oh yes, as the female companion, my wife enjoyed the evening too! Gain, many thanks...
Alan Green (E52)

CODE 23
When you are offered a job out of zone or you bid for one and you would be running an excessive distance, you can do a code23 to get a bigger run-in ie £4.40 or £4.80. After doing this, your screen says: 'request received'. Does this mean you 

can have the extra run-in or do you have to wait for a message from the control room? I have on occasions been given a message from the control room giving me extra and thanking me for running to cover the job but more often than not, get no message back and therefore when that happens I'm not sure if I can have extra or not. Would you please pass this email on to the powers that be and publish their reply in next months Call-Sign.
Paul Shaw (B19) ...via email

According to Lee Moreland, the senior Controller on the day shift, when you send a Code 23, the 'message received' on your screen means that the Call Centre has received your request. They then need conformation that the customer is prepared to pay for an extra run-in. Some clients have given permission to go up to a maximum run-in and that enables the dispatcher to reply to your request quickly. Otherwise the client has to be 

SIX OF ONE???
Another excellent reader's letters in the August issue. Peter Murphy's number plates in particular caught my eye. Many years ago I worked on sales development for a major supermarket company, and on the way to the Great Yarmouth branch I was over taken by a Merc with the plate 5 TAR. At the time Freddy Starr was top of the bill at one of the shows in town and I have always presumed it was him - or at least his car.
   However, the main reason his letter caught my eye was because several months ago I was told that the DVLC do not issue 

plates bearing the number 666 unless it is a private plate, due to it's biblical connotations with St John's Book of Revelations and the quote which I believe to be: "And the number of the beast shall be 666". The numbers come from an ancient occult belief that all letters have a numerical value and when added up can give cabalistic powers to those in the know. Indeed, the infamous late Aleister Crowley changed his name from Alexander to take advantage of the powers he believed this would give him!
   At first I found this hard to believe and found myself looking for a car plate with this number. Then I wondered if the PCO would issue plate 66666 and then I saw it! A very nice metallic blue Metro Westminster on Euston Rd. Two days later, again on Euston Rd, I saw a Bentley with the plate PAN 666. Superstitious rubbish or not, that was one vehicle I was going to keep well away from!
   Is the owner a high powered wizard? Perhaps the leader of a black coven, (the Queen, apart from being the head of the Church Of England, is also head of all England's covens through the Knights Of The Garter). I don't know, but when Aleister Crowley reputedly tried to raise the devil in a ceremony in Caxton Hall in order to bind him and assume his powers, Pan is the deity alleged to have appeared, but a disciple panicked and the ceremony went wrong and Crowley was left mentally disturbed for the rest of his life. However, it is more likely that the effects of his desperate struggles to escape an addiction to heroin was the real cause of his mental state.
Eddie Lambert (V27)

If I'm ever lucky enough to get a wait and return to Manchester and the fare comes to £666, I think I'll tell the passenger to keep it!...Ed

SPECIAL NEEDS
Could somebody please explain to me why I can pick up a twenty stone adult male in a wheelchair with a Fairway, but am unable to pick up a child in a wheelchair as a Metro is needed. Who made this rule and why? I've seen the following messages several times in addition to others: 'Metro cab urgently needed in NW8 for special needs job' or 'Metro cab urgently needed in SW1E for school job' or 'Offered job in W9 going local - Metro cab only'.
In addition, can you tell me for whose benefit is the W9W rank? It is certainly not for the majority of drivers who find when setting down in any of the zones just after 1.30 that forty three cabs are already booked in!
   As we have a Board member in the operations centre, surely he can come up with a better solution, perhaps allocating the first out jobs on a pre-booked basis to a different driver each day leaving the later ones in the primary zones to fall in with drivers normal work.
A.Guerrier (L28)

I made a few enquiries for you and this is what I've come up with. There is no rule re Metro Cabs or Fairways for children (or anyone else). If it says Metrocab only, this is because the customer has requested it. Otherwise the job will be available to any cab. As for W9W, I suspect that any rank with a specific opening time where roaders are due to come out is going to be inundated within seconds. No one in the Call Centre has the power to get anyone onto the rank in any order, it is purely the computer. Make sure that your aerial is straight up and if you fail constantly to get in, try Roman Way to check on your outgoing signal. There is no facility to allocate on a pre-booked basis, but as the jobs are all AD, non-rejectable and the order is mixed up frequently, everyone has the same chance...Ed

GROUND TRANSPORTATION (1)
I believe that DaC must be able to compete with licensed private hire and if a city company wants 

GROUND TRANSPORTATION (2)
I think it is true that without some sense or knowledge of history, sociology and economics that a company seeking to leap into the future can make serious mistakes. Thus I find myself at odds with the Board of Management's attempts to infiltrate alternative methods of transport into our taxi company without an adequate explanation. It should be noted that historically, our existing system of Capitalism has always sought ways and means of de-skilling any professions that have allowed the working classes to carve a lucrative niche for themselves within Capitalism. Printers, miners, dockers, are a few examples.
   That our Board is pursuing a course of action that could eventually undermine our trade merely because of a request from an unquantified outside source is sociologically even more disturbing. From an economic standpoint, to suggest the purchase of a small fleet of limousines, expensive to insure, service, and maintain securely, and to staff these with drivers working at lower rates than we expect for our efforts is plain daft and slightly insulting, and is an action cannot that be judged without full financial figures or estimates being available for counter argument by the members.
   Merely because within some large organisation, the department or individual now responsible for providing alternative transport would like to case their present workload onto us by merely picking up a phone to Dial-a-Cab, without the financial burden and potential risk of heavy financial loss cannot be justified. In any case, our experience on the streets is that many large companies, Reckitt and Coleman for example, have largely dispensed with chauffeur driven fleets and rely upon taxis and minicabs. Their in-house accountants have obviously decided that keeping such a fleet is uneconomic. Allied to the fact that our non-profit making structure makes it impossible for any financial gain to be passed on to the existing membership, it becomes even more difficult to see who gains in either the long or short term.
   The other factor that disturbs me has resonance to the excellent suggestion of periodically rotating the membership of the Board of Management. I have long been of the opinion, (and argued in these pages) for a change in our structure that would enable us to move forward. The attempt to take our company onto the fringes of the stock market failed, quite properly in my view, because it did not offer sufficient guarantees for the membership.  Despite this, the Chairman, speaking for the Board, has said that as this attempt failed there will be no more efforts in this area, despite there being several alternatives to public flotation.
   This leads me to think that fresh blood and fresh thinking at the top might be required. The insularity expressed by certain Board members in responding to suggestions of change and the lack of full disclosure of business plans, fully thought through and explained and acceptable by the membership, inevitably raises doubts about their freshness of thought. In passing, 1 thought that Boards of Management supervised the actions and trained a secretariat to run a company, not made themselves indispensable.
Jon Tremlett (Y32)

GROUND TRANSPORTATION (3)
Why not give the customer what they want. We are a niche business and we are losing out to minicabs because they offer more services.
Colin Goodwin (F43) ...via email

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