Good Example of Bad Management

Taxi el 3asema is a new service in Egypt that was introduced maybe a year ago or something. It is supposed to provide people with on-call taxi service. You call the company and reserve a taxi for the place you need to go on the time that you need. Three companies offer this service in Egypt.

The funny thing is it has not been more than a year and the service already sucks!!

All the following issues happen:
1- You call and reserve a taxi, the taxi never shows up, the company never calls to say sorry. And if you call they tell you the taxi made an accident.
2- You call and reserve a taxi, before your date by 10 minutes they call and say they have no car available for you.
3- You call and reserve a taxi, it is late, and you call the company they keep telling you it’s on its way until you are fed up and late for your appointment!!
4- The taxis now have parking slots in some places (Tahrir, beside city starts). The rule is, you go to the parking area and if you find a free taxi you ride in and then tell him where to go. What really happens is: you find a free taxi, he asks you where you are going and if he does not like the destination, he says No!
5- One day I tried to take one of those taxis at Tahrir square, I found the taxi but could not find the driver, and then I saw a man standing near the taxi with a tourist, I asked him: are you the taxi driver? He said NO. So I kept waiting. I waited for a long while and that man was still chatting with the tourist. Once I got bored and started moving away, the man and the tourist took the taxi and the man – who turned out to be the driver- drove away. Obviously he was discussing fees with the tourist to cheat him out and take the fees to himself instead of delivering it to the company.
6- My sister once tried to take one of those taxis from beside city stars. First he said no and then he changed his mind and told her to get in; he did not start the charger to calculate the fees based on the distance traveled. So she commented and told him that he is supposed to start it. The answer was: It is for your own benefit I will take less than what it will charge you!

All this is a sign of bad management. There are no rules or regulations and no one is watching over those drivers. No one is monitoring the call center as well to make sure that if you book a taxi, you get one on time.