Poor Cabbie!

My cabbie got fined by a damn annoying traffic police on my way home from a client's place this evening. It seemed like he violated an invisible traffic law. I'm vouching that it wasn't the cabbie's fault at all.

As soon as I got in the cab, I had told him to keep right. Tried as he might from quite a distance to get into the right most lane - but a bunch of arsehole, inconsiderate, rat-sucking pigs of Bangkok drivers had simply refused to give him even a wee bit of space. As a result, he had to keep to the middle lane. But while nearing to the junction where he had to keep going right to get to the correct lane, another idiot decided to zoom right past him and moved towards his left as he was going right. He reacted by swerving a little to the left most lane to avoid the freaking car. At this point, he had almost missed the junction where he was supposed to keep right because of the retarded driver. He managed all right, but was promptly stopped by a pappadum-brained traffic police within 30 meters of that junction. It is the most annoying position to be stopped as it is the intersection from the expressway towards Sukhumvit, merged by 3 lanes of on-coming traffic towards one direction. Pappadum-brained policeman then gave him his fine and it took him only 15 minutes to check his license and issue him the papers.

Poor cabbie - he wasn't very happy and started to grumble and explained to me, in Thai, no doubt, of where the mistake was. Shaking his head in despair, he said that it was his 2nd ticket today and I did see him fussing about with another set of similar looking papers as we were waiting for the traffic light. I really felt sorry for him and I know I'm not obliged to pay for his fine either. Not that he asked me to anyways. But really, a cabbie doesn't earn much in this country and I have no idea what the fine would have costed him. Besides, it was not his fault. He just pointed to the fare on the meter as I got out of the cab, but I gave him 140 baht for my 50 baht fare. I know it's not much, but I hope it lightens his burden for the day.