“Mason and Vallejo please.” Then almost immediately, I asked, “Is it difficult to find a cab on Saturday nights in the city?” I asked as I got into the cab.

“Yeah…there’s a lot of xmas parties going on. Where to again?”

For the first part of the evening, I was in Potrero Hill and planned to leave the area for North Beach around 10:15 pm. Despite preparing ahead of time with a list of cab companies numbers, I wasn’t able to get a cab out to that distant “far” area of Potrero Hill. Most of the numbers had an “error in connection” or a busy signal. I would try again and again (thank god for easy redial). When I did get through, the call would suddenly drop. At one point, I got to a dispatcher and said that I would get a cab “soon”. I waited until 11:30 pm until I started thinking about how I could just walk down to a busier area and flag down a cab.

Fortunately, a few friends were driving to the Tenderloin to pick up something left at a party. They dropped me off on Van Ness and Eddy. There, I saw a flurry of cabs going up and down the street. This has got to be easy. So I start flailing about, you know, hailing the cab. But as I paid more attention, it turned out all the cabs on this street had the “for hire” sign turned off. Some had passengers. Some were just empty cabs cruising the streets.

At one point, a white passenger van pulled over and backed up to me “do you need a ride?”

Despite my frustration, I said with common sense, “Uh…no!”

The van went away. And somehow miraculously, a cab saw me and was for hire. I gave the cab driver a hefty tip for my relief. And arrived to North Beach at 12:15 am.