Rotimi
Rotimi Odunaiya
Taxi company: Independent
Years driving: 25 years
Languages spoken: Yoruba and English
Photo Location: Queen Street West, outside of Steve’s Music
Date: April 4, 2016
Interview Excerpt:
What’s your favorite food to go and eat in Toronto?
I don’t eat much junk food. If I feel like eating just Chinese food, I go to Swatow. I go and grab my food there. Or sometimes I grab Subway sandwich or Quizno’s. So that’s what I eat mostly.
You mentioned earlier that you had an interesting passenger?
The one with the Kramer on the Seinfeld. So he was sitting down right in my car. I didn’t know it was him. I just recognized this voice, that this voice was kind of familiar. So when I looked in the back to see—because he had a sun shades on I couldn’t recognize. And he had a hat on because that was during winter time. So I turned back and I said, “Oh, are you Kramer from Seinfeld?” He said, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.” So I said, “Okay, take off your hat and let me see your face with your glasses off.” So he took it off and I said, “Yeah, yeah, it’s Seinfeld.” So I took a picture. So when he get off to where he was going—He was going down to Queen and Euclid, and he give me a dollar tip.
Can tell me briefly just how things have changed in 25 years of being a taxi driver? Can you tell me how things have changed since?
Yeah. Like I said, things have changed a lot now because it’s kind of hard for people to make ends meet. So the drivers have to put more hours just to get some little change to get on to where they used to surely be. But what can we do? There’s nothing we can do because when you have a mayor like “Mr. John Uber” who doesn’t care about the city. Most specifically the cab drivers that follow the rules and regulations of the city and all the bylaws. So that’s the way I’m going to look at it. Hopefully, probably when people sit up—when people wake up, they can see that Uber is not the way for them to go.
