How to Escape from Washington-Dulles

One of the perils of travelling to Washington-Dulles is that you are beholden to the Washington Flyer cab company if you haven't called ahead and made alternate transportation arrangements. They are the only cab company allowed to be in the cab stands, and the number of scheduled cabs decrease in the evenings, and if there's bad weather, they don't call in extra cabs even though the average cab rides double, triple, or quadruple in time.

So you wait in a long twisty line extending back to baggage claim with a hundred or more other travellers for 30 minutes to an hour, and a curious thing happens after you've left messages on the machines of all of the people who could come rescue you and drive you home without invoking a large karmic debit that must be repaid with your first born child or a 6am pickup on a Saturday morning: you are forced to make temporary friends while you involuntarily participate in a massive geographical auction. This is the best kind of friendship because you never have to see these people again.

For the visitor - and there were many among my campadres in line on a snowy Saturday night - making friends is important: the locals can tell you that folks going to the Hyatt Dulles should speak up when the low man on the taxi totem poll (the guy who wanders up and down the twisty line of people) yells out "Herndon! I need 2 for Herndon!" Plus, we know where all the good restaurants near your destination are, and which museums downtown are highly over-rated. The locals get additional people looking out for their best interest ("Over here! There's someone for Herndon over here!" they can chorus loudly).

By "speak up", I mean, of course, yell and wave your hands. Yell loudly, because the low man on the taxi totem poll isn't actually paying a lot of attention. Be proactive, because the low man on the taxi totem poll apparently skipped local geography when he was in school. Be persistant, because the low man on the totem poll has a memory like a sieve. But when his boss comes to reprimand him (as happens frequently) for a variety of crimes small and large, look away, because he will remember who witnessed his beatdown.

So when he yells out "I need 1 for Potomac! Potomac, Maryland" yell out that you're going to Rockville "which is just next door." You'll skip 20 minutes of waiting, and get cheered and applauded by the folks around you in line (who now have hope that that they'll stop calling out exotic ports of call like Springfield and Prince Georges County, and start calling out places that are close to where they actually live).

In those down moments where the lucky ad hoc foursomes of folks headed for ArLINGton and downTOWeN are herded out into the cold to tell their lucky cabdriver what he's won - I mean, where he's off to, you too, can agree with the guy next to you in line that next time you are going to be smarter about getting out of the airport. You start swapping strategies that go far beyond calling another cab company from the plane or even bringing a set of local taxi phone numbers; no, now you want to beat the system. There's the go to a nearby hotel strategy, where you can get another cab, and the flat out lying to the Low Man on the Totem Pole strategy, and the remora strategy where you wait for someone in line to call his long-suffering wife and then cadge a big favor and have them drop you off (this requires a charm, expertise, and lack of morals that neither of you quite posess) -- and just then HIS town gets called and he abandons you to more ice castle fantasies that have you already bound for home while some lucky schlubb at the back of the line gets whisked into a cab bound for Chantilly while you shuffle forward behind the Bad Luck Twins who tell you how much bad luck they've suffered through on this trip and how when they get to the front of the line, the cab supply will have dried up.

Next time? Next time, I'm calling a cab from the plane. Really.