taxis and change

So this morning at 845 I decided that I’d need to cab it to work given that I had a 9 am meeting. Checked my wallet and found a variety of small bills but not enough for the cab ride, and a five hundred peso bill. Bummer.

Trying to spend a five hundred peso bill at times is like trying to hand someone a Kleenex that they know is full of the ebola virus. You can do it when paying bills or at the grocery store but most other places will not do it happily. The cashier will always ask you if you have anything smaller.

I flag down a cab – you can do that during the day in Montevideo, at night not so much – and ask him if he has change. This is not that I could really refuse to get in if he didn’t but so much as to warn him.

The guy drives slower than hell all the way downtown, which was irritating, but he was at least 70 years old and had the Parkinson’s-tremor thing going on in his hands… I figured slower was safer and I said nothing.

We get downtown and he spends like 3-5 minutes with me sitting there at the curb in the cab while he goes to get change. He comes back with the change (cab ride from my apartment to downtown is 97 pesos, the bus is 14,50 when there’s time) and says “Oh, I had the change, I just didn’t want to be inconvenienced later.”

I said nothing, there’s no point.