SF Cabbie Stereotype: The Gearhead

This is classic Bay Area. So I get into a cab last night at 8th and Market and 1130pm, slightly tired but juiced up and ready to party it up in the Marina district in SF.

Cabbie was friendlier than usual and we started chewing the fat about the weather, the summer and other things you’d expect to talk to cabbies about.

Conversation suddenly turned to how I was being very productive on Caltrain because of my laptop card. I virtual-patted myself on the back for my attention to efficiency. I was awesome.

But the other shoe dropped when my cabbie disclosed that he had hacked his iPhone in order to be able to tether the laptop to the modem over the EDGE network.

Gulp.

Before I had time to violently retch at my unsavory faceplant, ol’ boy busted out his iPhone and showed me all the cool things that he’d done with it, including a screensaver of a beer mug, a Windows XP startup sound and other myriad wonders enabled with the help of a “bunch of hacker blogs”.

Double gulp. Was this guy a writer for Engadget and just driving a cab for shits and giggles?

He ended the ride with countering my assertion of a 200 dollar 3g iPhone and claimed that the blogger who predicted it had been wrong many times in the past.

At this point, I swallowed my pride, vowed never to underestimate a cabdriver, and rolled into the bar to become one with a bunch of shallow-ass Marina people.