Editor's Diary: A Taxi ride from Hell

Before I could hail a taxi, I noticed a Pharmacy which misspelt ‘DRUGS’ as ‘DAUGS’.

And that’s when I realized that ‘A’ is really an ‘R’ which has loosened its belt.

Taxi arrives

Anyway, I jumped on a taxi like I owned it and went straight to the backseats. And then told the conductor to let me know when we reached Kansanga, around Kampala International University.

Seated next to the window on the right, I dropped my head so I could get some shut-eye. It was necessary before I met the lady I was going to meet and we sailed through the night on waves of passion going up and down.

Soon, the seats next to me were occupied and a minute or so later, I heard two voices on the seats in front of me.

Both were gravelly voices which indicated their owners were roughhewn guys who probably had huge bulges everywhere except in their pants.

“Let me jazz you about this guy who pissed me on Facebook,” one of them said.

“Who dat?” the other asked.

“Some idijot who goes by the names Philip Matogo,” the jazzy guy replied.

That’s when I paid keen attention (even though I didn’t raise my head) to hear from who’s who in dumbest and dumber-dom.

“I wrote about my experience about falling into a man hole, a very painful one by the way, and the idijot comments ‘how did you get out’…so I reply, ‘the way I got in.’ And that fool said, ‘so you fell out of a man hole? Or did you fall out with a man’s hole?’ Man, people started insinuating that I was into Side-B because of that idijot’s comment!”

“Whaaat?” replied his buddy.

“If I meet that guy, I will beat the hell out of him. He deserves to bleed!”

“I am with you, we melee that fool together…teach him a proper lesson.”

I raised my head a little to take a look at these two guys and quickly realised they were broad-shouldered and either they were very tall or had very long heads.

This was scary, these guys looked so big that they could block out the sky and they wanted to leave Bata shoe-prints on my behind.

Terrified, I decided to keep my head down so that they wouldn’t see me.

Tax finally leaves

The taxi set off and twenty minutes later, I heard the conductor reminding me that we had reached Kansanga.

I ignored him until one of the big guys who wanted to kill me tapped my head, “You’ve reached your stage, Ssebo,” he said.

“It’s okay, I will get off later,” I replied, my head seemingly bowed in prayer.

He relayed the message to the conductor and off we continued with these two guys talking about all the ways they would abbreviate my life.

I waited for them to get off the taxi so that I could get off too, but they went all the way to Ggaba…where the taxi stopped at a place that looked like a ‘Boyz II Men’ song…♫We've come to the end of the road ♬

Finally, the two guys alighted but still stood outside the taxi talking animatedly with their fists being cupped by open hands like a rigged game of rock-paper-scissors.

So I stayed on the taxi and when the conductor came to ask me to leave, I tripled the fare I owed him so I could sit and wait like a Sydney Youngblood song.

And these two guys went on orally dreaming up ways to Karate-size and jujutsu-fy me for another 10 minutes before they calmly walked into the night.

Immediately, after they were gone, I jumped off the taxi and called my chick…

“The telephone number you have called is not available at the moment…”