Past and Present...

I work for a family run Taxi company. (ALOHA TAXI) Been in the business for over 10 years. Before I had a drivers license my job was the car washer. At the age of 16, I moved up to dispatcher. This was when we had the largest taxi company on the Island. Close to 20 vehicles and multiple hotel contracts. Stress levels were out of sight and the complaining never ended from both drivers, customers and resort employees. This is where I learned you can't keep everyone happy, but you can try your best. Multi tasking was a must, answering phones, taking reservations, telling drivers where to go and doing all this at the same time. Basically tried to keep everything going like a well oiled machine.

On an average day we would do about 100 runs in 18 hours. One of my busiest days ever was during an Ironman. I logged between 250-300 taxi runs in a 10 hour shift, all while the roads were blocked, traffic at a crawl, and the phones blowing up. This day I didn't even have time to leave the desk and microwave my homemade lunch. Not a happy camper this day, but handled it like a pro. I hated the Iroman this day, but still knew someday I would be competing in it.

Today is much different. Now we have 5 taxis with 5 full time drivers, instead of 20 taxis and 50 employees. The system we have now is much less stressful and still makes money. The people we work with are happy and pleasant to work with. A huge difference from what it used to be!

This is usually the slow time of year. Hotel occupancy is way down, flights are empty, family's are going back to work and the kids are going to school. This situation is both good and bad. Good that I have plenty of time to train and bad because I don't make as much money. This is one of the reasons why I started training for triathlons. I love bodyboarding, but only when it's BIG. I got tired of waiting for big swells and work being slow, so had to find something else to occupy my time. 20 hours a week of training filled the void pretty fast!

Some day's I find it's too slow even with work and training. For example, if I just have to swim 1 hour for training and do 2 taxi runs that may take an hour. That's only 2-3 hours of my day. What else is there to do? Eating is fun, TV is boring for me, Internet gets old, I can only harass the Bike Works crew for so long. HAHA! I just get so bored and restless! The ideal thing would be to find something that takes up my free time and makes $$$$$$$.

I've tried other things in my life including; cook while in college, real estate agent, loan officer. Cooking worked out great while in college because I worked in an Italian restaurant and got all the pasta I could cook. I got my real estate license when I was a senior in college and tried it for 6 months after graduating, but to no prevail. Big dissapointment for me. I just ran out of time and had bills to pay. A really tough business for someone my age! Maybe in the future I'll try it again. As a loan officer I just got tired of giving high intrest loans. It made me feel like I was ripping people off instead of helping them.

NO TRAINING BLOG TODAY, JUST A LITTLE HISTORY OF CODY!