My instinct was to tell Mr Nasty to go have sex with himself. I knew that making such a statement might result in an email against me … and one which could end my only possible source of income right now. So I sucked down my fury and maintained a polite conversational tone. Saying:

‘I was actually born here, sir. A true Angeleno. I’ve spent much of my life stuck in traffic.’

‘But you still steered us into some serious shithole constipation …’

‘The reason why there has been this sudden build-up of traffic –’

‘– is because you don’t know how to do your job and because, like every loser behind the wheel, you only listen to where your fucking GPS tells you to go.’

Silence. I found myself tensing after that second ‘loser’ slap across the face; his immediate sense of superiority being his way of telling me: I may be nowhere in this world, but I am at least three ladder rungs higher from nowhere than you.

Count to ten.

It’s a strategy I use every day – to keep my own quiet rage in check as I do a job that I don’t want to be doing. But as my career options have flatlined – and the only other work possibilities are minimum-wage nightmares (like stacking shelves at Walmart or doing an eight-hour buried-alive shift in an Amazon warehouse) – sitting behind the wheel of this car still strikes me as less of a mind-fuck option. Even with a guy like this one in the back seat.

‘Now as you will see on the right, sir, the reason we’ve run into such traffic is because that Triumph chopper went under the wheels of that Jeep Cherokee … and the driver of the bike looks kind of dead to me.’

Big Boy looked up from his phone and stared out at the body beneath those Detroit-made wheels. He finally said:

‘He’s not getting to wherever he was going.’

‘Time is never on our side,’ I said.

‘So now you’re not just an Uber sad sack, but a philosopher.’

‘What kind of work do you do?’

‘What business is that of yours?’

‘Just making conversation,’ I said.

‘Say I don’t want conversation?’

Silence again. We were crawling by the scene of the crime. Cops everywhere. Two ambulance guys covering the dead biker with a sheet while a third colleague came out with a fold-up metal stretcher. Meanwhile the driver of that new-model Cherokee – I figured him around twenty, all skinny and tanned with Daddy money behind him – had just finished blowing into the breathalyser held for him by a woman cop. The kid looked like he knew that his future was cooked.

‘Sales,’ the big guy said. ‘I’m in sales.’

Just as I figured.

‘What kind of sales?’

‘Fiber optics.’

‘No kidding,’ I said.

‘No kidding what?’

‘You into optical transport? Baseband video?’

‘How do you know that shit?’

‘Ever heard of Auerbach?’