**PLAY THE GAME OR BECOME THE GAME Part 2**

Everything seemed to run smoothly after the silly misunderstanding over the free rides I was accused of giving to vote against the electric take over but I was sure that a major grudge was going to be held by the city manager and others closely connected to him. I could go into a lot of boring details about many things that happened in our first two years of service but I think that it would just be a waste of time.

Bert's taxi lasted a little more than a year and at one point I didn't take one single day off for way over a year because of determination. By the first part of 2003 our taxi service was doing extremely well and we had so much business that it felt almost too good to be true. My wife and I both had our share of suspicions about many of the rides we were giving and people were making comments about some of the places that we would frequently do business. Several friends were telling us that it looked like we were being used as the cover for drugs and I started to become concerned about what should be done to deter this kind of business.

For several decades I've heard many things about the criminal enterprise that has existed in this county and all of a sudden I was starting to pick up an enormous amount of details about a lot of the people that are responsible for supplying the majority of the illegal narcotics in this area. I had no idea of the magnitude of this operation and it was a real shock once I learned about the way things are operated by the higher ups.

By the summer of 2003 I had built a nice work shop behind our house and a friend that is a GM Goodwrench mechanic started coming by to work on things that were in need of repair. At this point we had five vans and most of them were high mileage units that required more maintenance than newer ones. I was able to find some pretty nice older vans at a really cheap price and we had such a volume of people that it wasn't cost effective to use new expensive equipment because too many things happen around the bar scene. It was nothing for us to give over one hundred rides in a twenty four hour period using three cabs and doing that much business made it necessary to have a couple of spare vehicles so when one of them needed a major repair a replacement was available.

We tried being available 24 hours a day a few different times and finally we decided to open at seven in the morning and try to close around three the following morning. I would take turns opening up in the morning with a driver and if I opened at seven a.m. I would work straight through the twenty hour shift. The driver would work from noon till three a.m. and then start at seven. We rotated back and forth like this for a long time and my wife would fill in any gaps. We always ran three vans after dark on the weekends because of the amount of calls that came in and it takes a person with a lot of patience to be able to handle the kind of business that often comes along with the nightclub scene. I bet you have heard the old saying about being the only one sober around a bunch of drunks and some times it can really get on your last nerve when someone is real intoxicated especially if it is a group of people. Its always been at night when the majority of our problems have occurred and its amazing that we have made it ten full years without a serious injury or accident.

I felt like our business had finally gotten established after three years and we were starting to become financially secure. We had a lot of upper class people using our service mainly because the police were cracking down on drunk drivers more than ever before. We were in like Flynn with the click as I so often refer to a certain group of people that control things around here but we also gave a lot of people rides that didn't have their own transportation. I always tried to help somebody that was down on their luck by providing a cheap ride or ever donating my time to many people that looked like they were in need of a break. I always got a lot of satisfaction from helping someone and it wasn't about money to me as strange as that might sound to some of you.

Over the last ten years we have kept an incredible amount drivers off the road that were too intoxicated to safely drive themselves and who knows how many lives could have been ruined if an inexpensive service hadn't been available. We have stayed cheap since the very first day that I started this taxi service and sometimes people that are well off financially reward us by giving a nice size tip. If we hadn't received some good tips over the years we would have never survived even the first couple of years and this town is full of people that are generous. I love Elk City and I plan on staying here another forty two years if that is possible.

Before I go any further with this story I would like to say that I have many faults and I have made a lot of mistakes in my life. No one is perfect but no matter what I did I couldn't have possibly deserved all the misery that has been dealt out by this game playing group of people that have control of so much. I may add certain details to this story at a later time and a lot of names are being withheld because I believe that I might still be able to patch some of the hard feelings up that exist with a few people in this county. I'm sure that in time I can forgive most of the things that have went on over the last few years but it will never be forgotten.