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We foreigners love to make up cornball complaints, like “there’s too much asparagus in this soup!” or, ”my aunty hasn’t been spoken to like that in years, call this a massage parlour?” If taxes aren’t the problem, it’s house prices or the sweat on frozen chicken. You’d think all the Oulu municipal authorities did was invent new punishments for expatriates gullible enough to buy a homestead in Etu-Löyty. Nonetheless, an item of local culture has offended me recently, and what better way to make more than one person feel sorry for me than to spread the bile around a bit.
 So you’ll never believe what happened to me last Saturday night. I left a bar at half-past three in reasonable condition, ordered a pizza and a taxi, and lo! and behold! five students stole it. I’ve nothing to confirm they were students, but they were grinning and jumping around outside Kaarlehovi, which suggests the worst sort of drunken biologist. Forgetting their grizzled chins and glazed expressions for a second, I waved my hand frantically (while running) at the driver of the taxi, who I expected to help me. Instead, he smiled a small satanic smile, and the whole infernal milk float shunted away at top speed.
Sound familiar? For the next hour and a half, you wander around the streets like Oliver Twist, meeting the sort of characters that sound wonderful in novels but are just plain annoying, like the girl who constantly repeats “I’m next in line!” and the guy who wants to get the same cab, but will “get out half-way and get my half of the fare from an ATM.” Through street after street taxis rush past. Two hours later, having managed to convince ladies going to Haukipudas you’re on their way, you arrive home, a place you just about recognise through the frostbite, brain-fog, and early-stage hypothermia. It strikes me that to avoid this needless suffering, all the nice operator with the sexy voice need do is give out a number for the cab. Grocery stores do it. Kela does it. Is anyone likely to fall in a snowdrift because they missed their turn at the tax office? So what’s passé about a numbered rota for Saturday night taxis? If it’ll help, I’ll smudge the number with lipstick on my forehead and run into traffic crying Danny Boy. I’ll take anything: sata neljä; kaksi-kymmentä yksi – even kaksi-sataa yhdeksän-kymmentä kähdeksän; that’s one syllable for every ten minutes of my life spared. I suspect I’m not the first this ‘number’ idea has occurred to, though I admit I haven’t seen any inflammatory letters in our holy Kaleva about it. Perhaps most readers are just too charmed by the leather seats, the electric windows, the beeping alien radio and the bum-warmers of the average cab– so that bitterness evaporates with the snow on their loafers, the moment they enter the car. lf so, I’m with you, but you just waited two hours in line at minus ten degrees rather than order without a number. Where did they take you with the flashing lights; did it hurt? Of course taxi drivers are the salt of the earth, curers of clubfoot, pickers-up of pizza rind, accepters of mouldy twenty-euro notes, and the only folk all evening who’ll laugh at your joke about the Finn and the moody penguin. Yes, to suggest they improve their service might be blasphemy, and backfire. But I’d like to hope that one day, if we make enough noise, when the bishop of Finland visits his Oulu stylist, or Antti Tuisku bother his loan shark after a concert, a cab is procurable at three am without tanning oil and platform shoes. They deserve it, bless their tails.
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