It's Thursday, 5th September, and the variety programme "Unbelievable" happened to be on TV. It told the story of three different taxi drivers from a small taxi company in Nagano, Japan, called Chuo Taxi.
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Story 1
Mrs Arai, a young mother travelled with her little boy to attend a wedding in Nagano Prefecture. She found Nagano in November to be far more wintry than she had calculated for and her son was obviously shivering in his pair of short trousers.
As they got into the taxi, Mrs Arai asked the driver, "Can you please take us to a place where we can get thick long socks for the boy?"
But at 7.30am in the morning, no shop was opened and Mrs Arai and her boy had no choice but to head straight for the wedding venue.
Just as the ceremony was about to begin, a staff from the ceremony hall handed Mrs Arai a paper bag. In it were a pair of long thick socks, just perfect for her boy!
After dropping Mrs Arai and her son off, the taxi driver had gone looking for what the boy needed, bought it and dropped it off at the ceremony hall with instructions for the item to be passed to Mrs Arai.
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Story 2
An elderly couple from Hokkaido was trying to catch a flight from Haneda airport in Tokyo. However, the taxi they were on was caught in a terrible congestion.
They had no choice but to get off at the nearest train station, hoping to get there in time by train. But the highly complicated train lines and the multiple transfers required were too complicated for the elderly couple who could not follow even the instructions given by the station master.
Just as they were in great distress, the driver of the taxi they had been on called after them. The driver had parked his taxi and gone after the elderly couple to check if they were all right.
Hearing of their distress, he laughed and said, "Is that the problem? Don't worry, I will personally escort you to Haneda Airport. It is my job to make sure that my customers get to their destination safely."
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Story 3
A young mother rushed to her sick daughter's kindergarten in a taxi. She asked the taxi driver to wait while she picked up her little girl. Then, in the same taxi, they headed to the hospital. To her horror, however, she couldn't find her wallet when she tried to pay for the taxi.
The driver waived the fees, and the young mother managed to persuade the hospital to look at her daughter. But she had no way of getting home with her sick daughther without her wallet.
Suddenly, the driver of the taxi she was on appeared with her wallet.
After leaving them, the driver had gone to an empty plot of land where he stopped his car and took out all the car seats to look for the lady's wallet.
Not finding anything, the driver put the seats back, drove back to the kindergarten to look for the missing item. After a long and unsuccessful search, the driver recollected that the young mother had stumbled over a step in her hurry and confusion. He promptly went to the spot where she had stumbled and found the wallet lying in a hole. The driver then drove an hour back to the hospital to deliver the wallet to the young mother.
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Chuo Taxi gives their drivers the authority to make decisions so that they can provide the best of services to their customers. Their placing of the customers' welfare before profit making makes them so popular that, apart from the one exception below, they are consistently the most used taxi company in Nagano.
Ironically, the year Nagano hosted the winter Olympics, they fell from the No. 1 place. The reason: they refused to take bookings from outside of Nagano.
"If our taxis are all taken up by tourists from outside, then the local people who need our service, the elderly and the sick, will not be able to get taxis."
A right set of priorities based on the right values. This, surely, is how God wants us to live in His kingdom.
