Tough luck for honest taxi driver

A sum of 10 UAE dirhams (less than $3) was the reward received by an honest taxi driver, who returned a sum of 36,000 ($10,000) left behind by a passenger in the cab, a UAE daily reported.

“I have to admit I felt a little bad because I spent a lot of time trying to track the passenger down and even spent more than an hour waiting at our office for him to come and collect the money. But I would have returned the money with or without the reward, so it doesn’t matter,” UAE’s the Gulf News quoted the Pakistani driver, Shaaban Ali, as saying on Wednesday.

Ali discovered that the passenger, a Saudi, has left his bag behind, so he had to go in a few rounds looking for him, but he failed to find him, so he took the bag back to the office.

“The bag contained Dh36,000, the man’s passport and some other documents,” Ali said.

In an hour, the passenger was contacted and he came to the office to collect his belongings. “He told me thank you and handed me AED10,” Ali told the Gulf News.

According to the newspaper report Ali’s family — wife and parents — live back home in the Pakistani town of Kohat.

It was not the first incident to have taken place with drivers of the taxi company. Another Pakistani driver, Sajjad Arif, has recently returned valuable belongings to a Nigerian businessman.

“A laptop bag with 106,500 Nigerian Naira (AED 2,480), passport, laptop, blackberry, cheque books and watch was left behind in my cab,” Arif, who hails from Sialkot in Punjab, Pakistan, was quoted as saying.

“We are here to earn our money by working, and not to make easy money. No matter what I would not even consider for a second about holding on to someone else’s belongings,” he said.

Arif said that the next day the passenger collected his belongings and thanked him cordially. He added that he had returned back mobile phones and other belongings to passengers several times before.

That must be one sad sad cab driver. Tough luck!