Herring days

The days after Christmas have been christened as The Herring Days.
Things are so bad that you cannot eat meat.
It is not quite that bad, but it is tough.

A little bit of history.
In times gone by you walked to a taxi rank or held up your hand to hail a taxi.
If you needed a taxi and you lived on a quiet road you would ring a taxi company of which there were quite a few. The drivers who worked for those dispatch companies paid a weekly fee plus a % of account work.
The odd bottle of whiskey or the odd pack of fags into the dispatch kept things rosy.

Then came the APP as in Hailo. One tap and your taxi was there, you could see his progress and it took off.
It started off at 5  % commission paid to Hailo,
Then it went up, and up again to 12%
The name changed along the way to the really stupid title FreeNow
Now in the next few weeks it is going up again to something like 15%
While in Germany I hear that the c omission is only 7%                                             

Well there is a new app ready to download called TAXY and they promise to charge the taxi driver less commission. By the way the revenue which is being generated through the app is being used to advertise.
Go to Spain and the advertisements are all over the airport.
This does not come cheap.

But if the motor is broken... they are missing out.

Another funny thing is they keep sending out thees surveys.

How are we doing?
Just a few minutes of your valuable time.

The surveys seem to imply that FreenNow is the best thing since the sliced pan.
Do you agree?
Strongly agree?
 Etc etc. 

Anyhoo as they say in Canada time will tell.

I started Monday with a lovely lady from Brazil, she was just back here after Christmas and her body clock had not adjusted back to Irish time.
She was late for work.

Really guys we are so lucky to have such wonderful people living among us 
The Polish workers  pulled us through the last recession and now so many who have stayed are putting down roots.
A lot of the migrants are very well qualified, architects, vets, computer whizz kids.

The future is dot com