Pass or Fail?

  

A week to the day after taking the TLC exam, I went back out to the taxi school at LaGuardia to find out my test score.  Anything less than a 70 and I'd have to retake the thing again, at my own expense, further corroding my minuscule bank account.

I was both excited and apprehensive.

An office worker asked for my name and the new hack license number I'd been assigned several weeks earlier.  She also wanted to see my MVD license as a further validation on my identity.

"I'd be happy with just a 70," I said, both to her and myself, as she ran her finger along the list of test scores in search of my result.  Her hand came to a halt and she hesitated a moment before looking up at me and asking, "What did you expect as a score?"

I felt like she was preparing me for the worst and I didn't know how to respond.

"Well," she continued, "as I'm sure it's no surprise, you handled the language questions without a blemish, but ... on the geography part you scored ... a whopping 86.  Were you really that worried?"

What, me worry?

My new hack license arrived in the mail a few days later.  It was a tiny thing, compared to the licenses we carried around in the 1980s.  Also, the woman who'd photographed me at the TLC office hadn't been particularly clever at setting an adequate flash output -- the photograph on my new hack license pictured a nondescript, haggard person in a darkly lit room.  Not that anybody, including me, particularly cared.

With June near its end, I was now free to begin to look for work.