A Chance Encounter

It is 8PM and I have just landed at Wellington Airport after a trip to Hamilton. I had asked for a taxi earlier and sure enough there is a man standing there holding a placard with my name on it. He introduces himself as Dean and even before we have reached his taxi he is already asking me where I work and what I do. He says he used to also work in the IT field for many years in the technical and sales side. He was part of the team taking care of www.stuff.co.nz NZ’s third site in terms of traffic and also was instrumental in getting customers for CityLink, Wellington’s high bandwidth network. I look at him in astonishment and almost involuntarily I ask him why he left all that and became a taxi driver. He said he found his previous job too stressful and he had done it too many years and was looking for a change and he was moonlighting anyway with a taxi so he decided to quit his job and buy a taxi and become self-employed. But his long-term goal is to have his own business maybe computer related. So I ask him what is stopping him and he says ‘plain laziness’.

So for the next half hour we talk about computers and life. I find out that he is divorced with two sons and has a girlfriend but no partner because “Marriage is a bad joke”. “Having boys is fun”. He tells me what courses and diplomas he has done and what jobs he has worked in. He asks me when I started with IT and I say “a long time ago I started with DOS”. It is his turn to look astonished, “I can’t believe that”, he says. And I reply “I am older than I look”. I ask him what sort of highs he gets from taxi-driving as compared to the almost daily highs you get in IT and he says “A high would be a drive from the airport to Paraparamu”. It turns out that he knows about Xplorer the GIS website that EGL creates and that he is acquainted with Ewan the guy at the Upper Hutt City Council that I used to liaise with and we both rediscover that it is a small world indeed.

And then there is a lull in the conversation and I am thinking about what he says about being an entrepreneur and suddenly I am almost thinking aloud about my desire to be an entrepreneur and now it is his turn to ask me in what is stopping me. After we have reached the house and I have paid him and we say our polite goodbyes and he adds, “It was a pleasure talking to you” and somehow for once it seems sincere and not a formality and I am about to say the same thing back but something stops me, maybe the feeling that I might not be able to match his sincerity. And he says "Who knows we might meet again", and I say "Yes, who knows, it is after all a small world". And later on I am thinking how we could talk so freely about things that mean so much to us to a perfect stranger like we were friends going on a drive and not a taxi-driver and his customer. Maybe it is God’s way of reminding me that I have a dream to fulfill and that He can came in any form to remind us of life's lessons.