Listen to this articleI first started picking up calls for Taxi Tim around November 2015, I figured that the company would be a great opportunity and for me to pay my bills and gain some experience.
When I first started working for Taxi Tim, I was told, that if I found a couple people that liked me as their driver, I could make them my specials. It’s always my word against his and his lie was the last straw! I was cursed and degraded while I had a customer from Iron Horse Grill in my vehicle Friday night.
There’s a guy named Al. Tim refuses to “fool with him” and pick Al up, and I usually was called to pick him up. Friday night was called to pick up Al from Amerigo’s in Flowood and take him across the street to Georgia Blue. I’ve done this numerous times and I’ve grown accustomed to be in the area when he goes out. When I dropped him off at Georgia Blue, Al said he’d be ready to leave in about an hour. Couple hours passed and I hadn’t heard from anybody when all of a sudden the “new” employee called me to pick up a package. I asked her if anyone had heard from Al lately. She checked with Tim and responded that “He was taken care of”. So I called Al, checked to make sure he was okay. Al told me that he started offering people $100 to take him home and that he had called dispatch twice and no answer. I told him that if he couldn’t get anyone through the main number he could call me. A little later on, I got a belligerent call after being dispatched to pick up from Iron Horse Grill. Al called Tim saying I demanded that he called me instead of dispatch. Which is a lie, and again, Tim taking things out of context.
The sum of the phone call I got next was, you don’t ever “steal” any of the company’s customers. Tim said he knew there was something wrong with me, that I’ve stole customers before. He grew suspicious this past Wednesday when I made over 200$ and his driver made pennies. He asked me how I did it, I said I had to bring out my hustle ability. If I was stealing anything, why did you, Tim, tell me to give Mississippi Blood Services my number if they couldn’t get through on the main line? Tim has never stuck with the contract that I signed when I started working for him, changing the contract to suit himself and not to protect the driver and the straw that broke the camel’s back was he tried to “fine” me $100. That isn’t in the contract. And he don’t care. He was looking for a reason to fire me. He never listens to the people who works for him and nothing ever gets done. It’s always an interruption of “stop, stop, stop” when you start to call him out and he doesn’t like it.
Tim can’t stand when someone calls him out for lying but he has no problem lying to someone else because he thinks it cute, it’s just part of the Taxi Industry. I told him before that we need to set a better example and a higher standard as a Taxi Company. Tim posed the question, shouldn’t the company run the company? He has strung me along for over a year offering a night manager position. While time and time again he has hired company drivers and promising them the position of manager, when I’ve been with the company the longest, but the people he hires leaves or is fired within a couple months.
Tim threatened to fire me Friday night. He said I was going to quit holding the night manager position over his head and I was going to quit calling him a liar. I can not stand a liar or a thief. It wasn’t my mission to quit but Tim really wanted me to. I never said I quit. I even had enough integrity to pay the cab stand fee for the week and not cheat him like he started cheating me.
Timothy “Tim” Burnham is the owner of the company. He has a vested interest in the company. I’ve told him before, a generic dispatcher wouldn’t care who you were. They’d go down the list, one driver on a call, next.. Next driver eating supper, next. Because he’s forwarding the phone to a new driver to dispatch, who has no experience dispatching, gives them a higher vested interest in the company that allows them to screen calls for themselves.
I even came up with a catch phrase on the company website that I managed, “ If the company takes care of it’s drivers, the drivers will take care of the customers. ” From a year of working for Timothy Burnham, his motto is, service the customers and screw the drivers.
I’ve done my best to keep Tim and the name of his company, Taxi Tim, out of my blog. But he’s lied to me, and strung me along for the last time. This is me calling you out as a liar. Lying is not funny. Lying is not cute. Lying is unethical. Lying is unmoral. And to stray from a legal binding contract is against the law.