I Hate Seattle

Looks like the City of Seattle has decided to get rid of public automated toilets. This is due to their widespread use by heroin addicts and hookers.

Who could possibly have predicted that addicts would be the main users of those toilets, back when they decided to put them in Pioneer Square and on Broadway?

If you liked the toilets though, don't despair - the city is selling them on eBay with a starting bid of only $89,000 - throwing away a mere $910,000 of your tax dollars on each one.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/17/us/17toilets.html

So the other day I call Yellow Cab and ask them to pick me up at a street corner in Pioneer Square. The dispatcher starts braying at me telling me they don't take corners - she needs a real street address. I guess they don't get Google over there or something. So I walk up the block to find a number, give her the street address and she's still barking and being generally nasty, so I told her - in classic Seattle passive-aggressive style - "Hey, you know you could be a little nicer to me."

Then she freaks the hell out and literally tells me "You want me to be nicer to you? F*** YOU! F*** YOU!" and hangs up. Yeah, literally. I thought I was on Candid Camera or something.

So I called again seeing if I could get her back and talk to her but I got someone else, and since I didn't have another cab number handy, I just told her to send me a cab. When the cabby got there I told him the story, and he told me Yellow Cab is hiring a lot of weird people lately. He said he suspected they're hiring people out of some job program to help the mentally ill, and that he's been getting a lot of similar complaints.

So, from now on: Orange Cab!