Upfront

I’M IN A TAXI. For budgetary reasons, I’m supposed to be reducing the number of taxis I take by roughly 100 per cent. I think I might be a taxiholic though, because the plan is not really working. I keep finding myself in taxis without really knowing what I’m doing or how I got there. Pesky painkillers mixed with alcohol.

The taxi driver I employ this morning is fiddling about with a laptop on the front of his passenger seat. I am not sure which I am less keen on: a taxi driver making calls on a mobile phone, or one who is updating his social-network status while he drives me from A to B-loody hell, watch out for that Dublin Bike.

The scenario reminds me of that taxi driver a few years ago who put a boardgame he invented in the back seat of his car. The incongruous presence of the boardgame, Mentalogy it was called, was a smart move, both as a conversation starter and a marketing strategy. Most people, I imagine, if they got into a taxi to find they are sharing it with a boardgame would make a remark, something like: “Somebody appears to have left a boardgame in your taxi, mister.” Not me. I knew what would happen if I mentioned the boardgame, so I kept quiet.

Bringing up the boardgame would have been exactly the opening he wanted. I knew his game. His other game. He wanted to regale me with tales of how he invented the boardgame and I’d have to listen politely, pretending I was interested and possibly feeling guilt-triped into buying one of them. The thing is, I’d already learned everything I could possibly know about his boardgame from the newspapers, because as well as being an inventor, he was a genius marketeer. I sat in the back pretending that taxis were the natural home for boardgames while he glanced at the rearview mirror wondering why I wasn’t asking him about it.

I feel a bit bad about ignoring his board game now. Would it have killed to me to make small talk about the game, his cardboard-and-plastic pride and joy? I haven’t seen him around lately. I really hope he gave up the taxi and became a boardgame millionaire.

This laptop in the passenger seat scenario reminds of the boardgame. I make a quick decision. I am not going to ask the taxi driver about the laptop. I am going to ignore it completely. I am going to act like it’s perfectly natural to drive accompanied by a laptop. I start thinking up plausible explanations. It’s probably his GPS system. Or he is expecting an urgent email from the taxi regulator. But most of all, I ignore the laptop all the while knowing that he is going to steer the conversation in that direction anyway.

It takes approximately 67 seconds. “You’ve probably noticed the laptop,” he says. What I want to say is “No, what laptop? I can’t see any laptop,” but that will only prolong the inevitable. He doesn’t wait for me to answer. He just tells me that what he is doing is having some fun at the expense of internet scammers. You know, those people who pretend to be princes in Nigeria or Russian women with very sick mothers who email complete strangers to ask for hilarious amounts of money and bank details.

It turns out the taxi driver is what is known as a scam-baiter, a worldwide community trying to rid the internet of scammers. He has a few different people on the go at any one time. They contact him in bad English, “with warm hearts in the name of Jesus hoping this letter meets you in good time”, asking for the loan of a few thousand for their ailing mother or their orphaned family. He writes back, leading them up the garden path, posing as a victim, sending false bank account numbers or keeping them on the phone for ages so they run out of credit. He gives them false names, strikes up a relationship, and makes them think he is going to pay out. All the while he is draining their time and energy, time and energy they could otherwise be using to scam others. He says, not surprisingly, the scammers don’t take kindly to being scammed.

He is kind of heroic, this online vigilante taxi driver. He and people like him are the bane of internet scammers from Nigeria to Siberia desperate to make a dishonest buck from poor eejits around the world. “I just got into it out of boredom, but I am really enjoying it now,” he says. As I write, he’s probably dropping someone to Tallaght and emailing some “farmer” in “Zimbabwe” to pretend that he has just lodged ten grand into their bank account.

There may be a health and safety issue involved with driving while operating a laptop, but if this is the kind of stuff taxi drivers are up to these days it just makes it all the harder for me to stop taking them.

THIS WEEKEND

Róisín will be watching TV3's dating programme Take Me Outfrom behind the sofa. Cringetastic yet oddly compelling TV