You are viewing a single comment's thread from:

RE: Traffic Koans [Day 18]

in #traffic-koans7 years ago (edited)

Wow, this is a great contest and a great story. I truly like stories that are true, because they are stranger than fiction. Unless someone presents such events, rarely ever anyone hears about it. They are like subculture tightly interwoven in the fabric of society, difficult to detect.

I hitch-hiked an ambulance long ago on some blistering hot summer day in the middle of nowhere, where the only means of transportation were my feet. It was a long ride, as he was on a retour from delivering a diabetic patient back home. And, his suggestion was that if any urgency occurs, he' drop me off, what I accepted. Believe me, it was a very refreshing ride with every pothole smoothed out with the ambulance's springs that were much better than in many other cars then. Each time there was a long file, the driver would turn on the siren, and whooosh , off we were. In such a case, I was instructed to sink in the front seat not to be noticed by police, but the ride was truly swift, it took half the time it usually did.

So, your nicely dressed violators must have pretty comfortable delivery to their work posts.

Lao Tzu answered this riddle long, long time ago, and his relieving answer goes like this (sorry for the back-translation): "When those who are the highest are greedy than those at the bottom steal."

Sort:  

ENLIGHTENED!!!

Oh wow! I never expected to enter with an exact ambulance story! Where do you live?

It's nice to hear a firsthand account of that. At first, I thought it was okay, since you hitchhiked on their way back from a trip and there was really no other means of transportation, but when they used the siren to manipulate the traffic, man... That's the kind of blatant corruption I wanted to point out that's why I included this koan.

This is awesome! Thank you for sharing your tale :D That's one of my favorite Lao Tzu quotes, so I appreciate the inclusion of it.

I live in Europe. This was so long ago that it most probably doesn't apply any more. People rarely hitch-hike nowadays. Besides, people now prefer carpooling, a website where people offer a ride for a small contribution or sometimes free. It works also for whole Europe.
The authorities wanted to tax it as black market work, but the lawyers declared it a tax free with the explanation that sharing the highway and gasoline costs while offering someone a ride isn't black market work.
Many of those services are listed on Free Man Post
http://www.freemanpost.com/art-freecheap-road-trip-ride-shares/

We have tons of those here too. The government wants a cut, when really people are just being economical and cutting costs and pollution. It must be that the government is just bummed they didn't thought of it first.

Coin Marketplace

STEEM 0.18
TRX 0.16
JST 0.030
BTC 62561.21
ETH 2449.99
USDT 1.00
SBD 2.64