Night Shift

On the way back from Finland I arrived in Paris late. I had to a take a taxi in the small hours of the morning to cut across Paris before catching the first flight of the day back to Biarritz. I must have been in the cab for just over an hour. During this time I got talking to the driver who, as it turned out, was also 33 years old. He was of North African descent, 137kgs, and had been driving in Paris for the last 9 years. We calculated that he had driven enough miles to have circled the global 33.5 times already. We also did a similar calculation for his weight – he had put on 4.1kgs in each of the 9 years due to the unhealthy living and diet that often goes with the job. Most interestingly he had a young son and his greatest pleasure was to pick him up from school at 4PM every day. Basically he worked from 5PM through to 6AM seven days a week (last year he only took 10 days holiday), sleeping on his return home after a quick coffee with his wife over her breakfast, before going to play football with his other North African taxi driving pals from about 12 to 3PM before a quick shower, and then off to pick up his son. We worked out our relative salaries and it was interesting to compare notes. We basically earned exactly the same but obviously in very different ways. All that was left was for me to calculate the price of seeing your children every day....