We have a friend who doesn’t mind picking arguments with the help. Cab drivers are the help, right? So yeah, there we were, stopping off in the West Village to meet some friends at a bar, and said friend went to pay the cab fare with his credit card. Except the driver, worried about losing a few pennies to the transaction’s surcharge, sneakily disabled the credit card option immediately after it popped up on the screen. And once that little touch-screen button disappears, there’s no going back, or so these cabbies tell us. He insisted that we had to tell him ahead of time that we were using a credit card, which is absolutely not true and, if we’re going to get technical, likely illegal. Grudge-holding as our friend is, he refused to let the matter go, threatening not to pay the fare unless the driver let him use his credit card. The driver threatened to call 911 and involve the police; our friend said “make my day”; the driver pushed some buttons on his phone and, perhaps, only pretended to dial 911. While we sat there waiting for a perhaps imaginary cop to show up to mediate this matter, we finally came to our senses: If we just paid with cash and got out of the cab, we’d be drinking alcohol much sooner.

So that’s what we did, and we were cocktailing in no time.

What’s the point of this whole story? Apparently our friend is in the minority, because 87 percent of you are still paying your cab fares with cash, even though four-fifths of New York’s cabs are credit card-equipped. Don’t you people know how to make use of your corporate cards?