Taxi Driver Online

A Blackpool Blogging Cabbie has finally found the Internet. There is no truth in the rumour that he's been searching for 14 years.
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Blackpool Gazette

February 2, 2007

HEADLINE: Keith the cabbie's on blogging shift

TAXI drivers can probably tell enough tales from the cab to make your hair curl. Loved-up couples, drunken camaraderie and customers telling all about his or her ailments are the staple of a cabbies' working life. And now, one bright-thinking resort taxi driver is chronicling his experiences at the wheel into an internet weblog, or blog. Keith Drury, 50, has cottoned on to the craze with his own light-hearted sideways blogs at life behind the wheel.

Keith, from Thornton, began 'blogging' three weeks ago after hearing a raft of stories during his weeknight shifts. He said: "I was always coming home from work with funny stories to tell so friends and family suggested to me that the MySpace website could be the perfect place to recount them. "I don't include people's names or addresses in the stories and rarely include dates or times so as to protect their anonymity. "I don't know who reads the stories but I hope they do enjoy them." Keith's stories are now being blogged on The Gazette's new-look website. They include the time when a man left his mobile phone in the back of his cab.

The man had visited the house of a 'female friend', who had a boyfriend. After dropping the man off at home Kevin heard the lost mobile ringing and answered it. It was the 'female friend' who declared her undying love and pledged to leave her boyfriend before Kevin could explain that it wasn't his phone. He also tells of having to drive the streets of Blackpool looking for people to return wedding rings and one worse-for-wear customer who claimed to have seen a ghost.

"The woman asked me to just drive around Blackpool for a bit to find a man whose wedding ring she had come into possession of!" laughs Keith. "Then I picked the guy up at night from a bar where he'd been working. "He was claiming to have seen a mysterious looking figure stood by the bar at about 3am. "I said to him 'Well he won't be able to get a drink at that time will he?' " "You wouldn't believe some of the stuff that people will get up to though. "All inhibitions seem to be lost when they get in the taxi." Mr Drury started taxiing just over a year ago after taking voluntary redundancy from his post at Electronic Data Systems.

"Taxiing can get in the way of your family life but some of the antics that happen are enough to make you smile. "You can't help but wonder about some of the people you pick up." Like all taxi drivers nowadays Mr Drury says he is used to the one liners such as 'Busy tonight mate?' and 'What time you on 'til?' "Peter Kay has a lot to answer for as far as those phrases go!" Log on to www.blackpool gazette.co.uk to read Keith's blogs.

THE RISE OF THE BLOG Sites like myspace.com, bebo.com and blogger.com have sparked a rise in internet blogging by making it very easy to create pages without the use of HTML programming language or any knowledge of the Internet. Users can now log on, type in their thoughts and post them directly on to the internet.

The term blog stems from the phrase 'web log' and has become so common that it has now become a verb - 'to blog' - and was voted word of the year by US publisher Merriam-Webster in 2004. * The blog is so popular that it has fought its way into mainstream journalism. Organisations such as BBC and the Guardian - and The Gazette - have whole sections of their websites devoted to blogs.
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