| Well the failure rate of the machines is super low, so experiencing nearly zero broken card machines would be about expected. The outcome of never experiencing a broken one certainly is rare, as you say, but it's nowhere near the astronomical claim made elsewhere of an 80% failure rate. I'm not asking anyone to believe that zero card readers are broken. I'm only saying I never experienced a broken one, and never experiencing a broken one isn't that weird because the failure rate is low. Someone saying that 80% of the time the reader is broken is making an extremely different type of claim, not really even comparable with my analogous claim of not ever experiencing a broken one. While my experience might also differ from average, it is orders of magnitude closer to average than someone happening to experience a broken one 80% of the time. I'm not sure what to say about the bags comment. Every time I've ever gotten a cab to or from any airport anywhere, from Boston to Hong Kong, the driver helped me with bags if I had them. And all the other drivers helped all the other people in line too. Maybe you're referring to the fact that I always experienced them coming early -- yes this could be highly variable. My anecdotes are probably no more valuable than others here on that point, mostly because nobody here extended the outrageously extreme claims they made (80% card reader failure, effectively zero clean taxis ever) into the topic of how late taxis are, though they might have (e.g. someone possibly saying another statistically unbelievable thing like 'taxis are always 30 minutes late' or '90% of the time they don't even show up' or something). Keep in mind that being early only applied to taxis I scheduled from home to the airport. I never called ahead to arrange a taxi except when going to the airport, so those are the only ones which could have possibly been early or late. The majority of cabs I ever took were cabs I just hailed on the street or at a taxi stand. |