Taxi drivers find corpses, PCs, phones

Found on The Inquirer on Monday, 24 January 2005
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A survey of taxi drivers showed that people are losing their mobile phones, their PDAs, their notebooks, and even their lives in the back of cabs, worldwide.

According to Pointsec, which surveyed 900 licensed cabbies in London, Sydney, Paris, Munich, Oslo, Helsinki, Stockholm, Copenhagen and Chicago, one driver turned round to find his passenger dead.

Other cabbies have found passengers' false teeth and their artificial limbs in the back of their vehicles.

The survey claimed to show that in the last six months, drivers of London's black cab unearthed 63,135 mobile phones, 5,838 Pocket PCs, and 4,973 notebooks.

The London survey was conducted by the Licensed Taxi Drivers Association, Taxi. But Pointsec claimed that an average of 80% of passengers were re-united with their mobiles after the cabbies tracked down their owners.

Wow. I should really consider a little job-change. I'd have new equipment all the time (well, ok... false teeth or a corpse aren't that useful, but you have to draw a blank now and then). And the excess stuff could be sold for some extra money.