Feral diabetes
Taxi story with quite a character. Be warned it’s a long one.
It all starts with me trying to get an Uber behind the Maadi grand mall at Fetar time the day before Eid. There are no Ubers in sight and the app is applying a surcharge due to high demand. I stop a taxi, he refuses at first and I tell him ”fine whatever, I’ll get an Uber and save my dignity instead of pleading with you”. I thought he had driven off but no. He parked across the street from me and came back running saying “What Uber? Over my dead body are you taking an Uber. It’s fetar time and no Uber can drive as fast as I can!” I tell him I really don’t want him to drive fast and I prefer getting home alive. He asks me how much I’m willing to pay, I give a fair price. He says ok let’s go. We cross the street heading to his cab when a dazed and miserable looking man also attempting to negotiate a crossing bumps into me. Immediately the taxi driver lunges at him screaming “look in front of you son of a sleepy woman (?), are you looking for any excuse to bump into a respectable woman? بص ادامك يا ابن النعسانة هو انت عايز بس تمشي تخبط في النسوان المحترمة؟". Before I could even understand what was happening a fight was breaking out. The street was empty but all of a sudden a handful of people appeared out of nowhere and separated the two men. We got into the taxi.
He starts telling me “people have lost their manners and they don’t know how to behave. It’s because of all the construction. Their stomachs are full of armored steel and cement. If you beat their stomachs with a hammer your hammer will break".
Immediately he started driving like a madman. I told him again to calm down. He told me that I probably didn’t trust and believe in god because if I did I would be sure that I would make it home safely. Then he told me that his current taxi wasn’t his anyways so he didn’t care if he crashed it: “I owed 15,000 EGP in electricity bills and the electricity company employee came to tell me that he would cut the electricity because I hadn’t paid. I told him there was no way I would let him cut the electricity during Ramadan. He ignored me so I got my gun and told him to leave or I would shoot him. My wife decided to take the gun from me so I shoved him down the stairs. They charged me with assault and theft of electrical current and I had to sell the taxi to pay. I asked to go to prison instead of paying but they said no”.
He then went on to tell me that he had a special kind of diabetes called ”feral diabetes” مرض السكر المتشرد that he cures by eating salad everyday but he still eats his favorite sweets. He told me he has to eat basbousa daily.
