The meter, the dispatch system and the card machine are three separate things that have to agree before anybody gets paid. Once every few weeks they all agree on a job I was not on.
I have driven nights for the same firm for eleven years. Eight until four, mostly.
There are three systems in the car and you have to know what they are for any of this to mean anything.
The meter. A sealed unit, calibrated against the car's own signal from the gearbox, certified annually by the council, with a tariff in it that the council sets. It charges by distance when you are moving and by time when you are not. It cannot be adjusted by me, and the seal is checked at the annual inspection.
The dispatch system. A tablet on the dash on the firm's network. The office allocates a job to me, I accept it, I press arrived, I press passenger on board, I press complete. Every one of those is timestamped at the server, not in the car, and every one has the GPS position attached.
The card machine. A separate terminal on its own mobile connection that talks to the bank. It knows nothing about the other two.
Those three have to agree before I am paid. A job on dispatch with no meter fare is a query. A card payment with no job is a query. Every week a woman in the office reconciles them and rings anybody whose numbers do not line up, and she is very good at it.
Since about 2019, once every three or four weeks, all three of them agree on a job I did not do.
A job appears on dispatch, allocated to my car and accepted, with a pickup and a destination. The meter runs a fare for it, the right amount for that distance on that tariff. The card machine takes a payment for that exact amount.
And I am parked on the rank with the handbrake on, which I can prove, because the meter is also logging distance, and it has me stationary, and the dispatch GPS trail has me stationary, and on two occasions I was on camera at a garage forecourt buying a coffee.
Here is what those jobs look like, because the detail is the whole thing.
The pickup is always an address on one street. Not the same number. That street.
It is a long residential road that runs up a hill away from the town, about half a mile of terraces, and it is an ordinary fare we do twenty times a night.
The destination is always the same: the crematorium, which is three and a half miles out and which has a taxi rank outside it because people do not like to drive back from a funeral, and which we serve all day long and never at night, because it is shut.
The fare is always right for that distance. Eleven pounds sixty on the old tariff and thirteen forty on the new one, which changed in 2023, and the fares changed with it. Whatever is doing this is using the council's current tariff.
The time is always between 02:10 and 02:50.
What I have checked, and I have had a lot of quiet hours to do it in.
The passenger. There is a name on the job, because the office takes one over the phone. Eleven different names across the ones I have kept. I did once look one up and I am not going to say what I found or did not find, because that felt like the wrong thing to be doing with a name out of a computer and I stopped.
The phone call. The office's phone system records the number a booking came from. On these, the field is filled in and the number is eleven digits and it is a landline code for this town, and the number does not connect. Not disconnected with a message. Rings out.
The card. This is the one I took to the manager. A card payment goes to the bank with a merchant reference and the bank settles it into the firm's account, and the firm pays me my share. The money arrives. It is real money and it has been in my wages eleven times.
The card number is masked the way they all are, last four digits. It is the same last four every time.
The manager's position, which I understand.
He has a job on his system with a complete audit trail, a payment that cleared, and a driver saying it did not happen. His system is not broken: everything in it is internally consistent, and the money is in the account, and nobody has ever complained or charged back.
He told me, in 2021, in a kind way, to stop looking at it, and that if I wanted he would take the eleven pounds sixty off my wages and we could forget about it, and he said that as a joke and then neither of us laughed.
What he did do is check with the other drivers. There are nineteen of us and I am the only one.
The bit that changed it from a thing I puzzled over into a thing I think about.
Last autumn one came in while I was on the rank, and I was looking at the tablet when it happened, which I never am, because at half two you are reading your phone or asleep.
It went through the whole sequence in front of me. Allocated. Accepted, which I did not press. Arrived, four minutes later. Passenger on board, one minute after that. Then nineteen minutes of the meter running with the car on the handbrake, and complete, and the card terminal lit up on its own and printed a receipt.
I tore the receipt off and I have it in the glovebox.
Then the tablet did the thing it does at the end of a job, which is ask whether the passenger was satisfied, a yes or no I tap without reading twenty times a night.
I did not touch it.
It answered itself after about eleven seconds, and the answer was yes.
I still do the nights. It is a good firm and the money at Christmas is the money that makes the year work.
What I have changed is that I do not work that street after one in the morning. I let it go out to somebody else, which costs me perhaps two fares a week and which nobody has ever asked me about, because a driver having a street he will not do at night is the least remarkable thing in this trade.
And twice a month or so, at around twenty past two, the tablet takes a job I do not press, and drives a fare I do not drive, to a place that has been locked since five in the afternoon, and a card that is not in the car pays for it.
The firm is up on the deal. That is the part that would bother you if I had told it to you properly. Every single one of those has cleared.