I was attending the Pittsburg Conference (Pittcon), which is the Comdex of analytical chemistry. In other words, the big show.

We were in our group and decided to go out for dinner to a local place on Wacker Drive for some Chicago style deep-dish pizza. After we refreshed ourselves in our hotel rooms, a taxi cab came by outside. At this point, the nightmare began...

It first started by the driver doing his Mario Andretti impression around street traffic at some ludricrous rate of speed. At one point, he decided to drive on the sidewalk because he felt that the traffic wasn't moving fast enough for him.

He flipped off some people and said something nasty in Hungarian to them. One member in our group, who was Hungarian, told me "you don't want to know what he said."

By the time we got to the restaurant, we were a bit shaken up. Norman, one of our programmers/project managers, was a complete wreck. After we settled down and had our dinner, it took a while to coax him into another taxi back to the hotel. When he got in, the first thing he grabbed was the seatbelt and hung onto the 'Oh Shit' handle.

This driver didn't weave in and out of traffic like the previous one - he simply floored it. We were travelling at high speed through downtown Chicago. I looked at the speedometer and it read 55. He slowed down to 45 while going through a red light, and sped up again. It was amazing that we didn't get into an accident and that we got to our hotel in one piece.

From that point, Norman wouldn't get into another taxi cab. Who could blame him?