Episode Report Card Miss Alli: B- | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Officer, we're not with him
By Miss Alli | Season 5 | Episode 8 | Aired on 08.23.2004
The Twinkies pull up to the airport and hop on the list for the second charter. They pay their cabbie without incident -- do you think maybe they feel a little more secure about money than the other teams? Could that be...foreshadowing? One of them comments that she's really happy to have crawled out of last place and be in the middle of the pack. Yeah. And all it took was two large mechanical failures impeding other teams. She should be really proud of what they've accomplished.
Dun-dun-duuuuun! Okay, let's get ready to grrrrrrrumble! Colin and Christie's driver pulls up outside the airport. Colin decides to grant himself a 50-percent discount, and informs the driver that he will give him 50 bucks -- he can take that, or get nothing. I have no idea what makes Colin think the driver sees that as one of Colin's options -- if Colin had the option of saying "50 or nothing," why wouldn't he have the option of saying, "Yeah, never mind, I'm not paying you." Or paying a dollar. You don't have that option, dear -- cabbies aren't going to just say, "Damn you, if you don't give me my hundred dollars, I don't want anything from you!", and then go stomping off with their hands on their hips. In other words, you don't have a new choice to make at the end of a cab ride. You're not free to decline the deal like you are at the beginning. You should assume that the cabbie has some method of enforcement, and he isn't really required to "take it" on a "take it or leave it" deal after he's already delivered the service. At any rate, the driver wants to know why Colin won't pay him the agreed-upon amount, and Colin tells him it's because he drove on the spare tire the whole way. The driver says he wants his hundred dollars, but when he declines to accept the 50 that Colin is offering, Colin says that's fine, and walks away with all of his money, apparently considering the matter closed. Yeah, probably. Fool. The driver looks after him unhappily. I have absolutely no idea why the driver didn't lock their bags in the trunk at this point, because I certainly would have.
Inside, Colin and Christie sign up for the second charter flight, and then Colin heads back to the cab for their bags. The driver, however, is on his way into the terminal, where he intercepts Colin. Colin, absurdly, starts arguing with the guy about how the delay made him fall behind other teams, which is totally not the point, because the guy absolutely could not care less, and isn't obligated to care. On the other hand, Colin says to him, "We said, 'If you want a hundred dollars,'" and then the guy cuts him off, so I think that Colin probably did tell the guy as they were leaving that they'd pay him a hundred dollars if he got them there in the cab in the same order they left in, but I also suspect that it was done as something of an afterthought, and that the driver wouldn't have taken it to mean they didn't have to pay him anything -- or that they could set their own price -- if it didn't work out that way. Furthermore, that wasn't even Colin's argument initially -- when he first offered the guy the 50 bucks, he told him it was because driving on the spare was unsafe. So I don't think he's making that up when he says it later, but it's not much of a leg to stand on. "Give me my money, one hundred dollars," the driver tells him. Colin offers 50 again, and the guy flatly refuses. Again, Colin seems to think it's over in that case, and he leaves, giving his snotty little, "Oh, well, your loss, you get nothing."