The Nature of Complaint

I don't ride in taxis much. We have them here, but I have a car and there's plenty of parking. The taxis are pretty much for the small segment of the population that doesn't have cars but does have enough money to pay for a cab. It's a dangerous job even here; two cab drivers have been shot in recent memory in my small metro area.

So it really never occurred to me before to wonder if cabbies talk on cell phones while they're driving. Evidently, they do. Even when they're not supposed to. This recent editorial from the New York Times discusses the prohibition on NY cabbies talking on the phone. (Evidently, other cities are not so concerned with safety.)

The sentence that caught my eye though was this: "Despite their reputation as expert complainers, New Yorkers apparently don’t like to do it officially."

Um, duh?

This is an example of a cheap trick that journalists, preachers* and other writers use when they're in a rush -- the false conflict. The sentence seems to make sense at first: If New Yorkers like to complain, they ought to be doing it. But what it ignores is that filing an official complaint is pretty much the exact opposite of actual complaining.

The satisfaction of real complaining (kvetching, I believe those New Yorkers call it) is not in getting results by having the problem resolved. The satisfaction is in the complaining itself. If the problem were resolved, the permission to bitch about it would be removed, thus resulting in lowered satisfaction.

I am too lazy today to get into what it is about complaining that is so satisfying, but I don't have to, do I? You know what I mean. You know people who go on and on about how annoyed they are. You know they enjoy it. I'm sure someone, somewhere, has done a study of this. It might be nice to know what they come up with. But on the other hand, it might be another announcement that a scholar has discovered the obvious.

Meanwhile, I'm left trying to decide if I would mind if my taxi driver was using a cell phone or not. I do it when I drive. I would assume that most cabbies are pretty experienced drivers. I think I'm going to go with a case-by-case assessment. Just as there are occasionally taxi drivers who shouldn't drive, as evidenced by how badly they do it, there are presumably taxi drivers who shouldn't drive and talk on the phone, as evidenced by how badly they do it. (There's probably a lot of overlap between those two groups, eh?) So I guess, if it were me, I'd wait till the phone made the driver do something stupid before I'd ask him to get off.


*About the false conflict and preachers -- I find I have to guard against this habit carefully. It is very tempting to begin a sermon with a strong statement of tension: "Such-and-such is what society says, but the Jesus said this" or "You would think things should be this way, but actually the exact opposite is true". The problem is that frequently, in order to make it work, you have to create a straw man, that is, exaggerate the thing you're trying to create tension with beyond what is fair. It's a cheap trick, and I try to avoid it. Starting a sermon with a falsehood can't be a good thing.