Driver clubs more convenient and efficient in Jakarta

By Zatni Arbi

JAKARTA (JP): Hiring a driver is a lottery. If you win, you'll get a driver that will give you excellent service for many years. If you're unlucky, he will start denting your car on the third day. Worse, hiring the wrong person can give you more headache than convenience. He may take your new car to a second-hand market in Sawah Besar, West Jakarta, and earn some extra money from selling parts and replacing them with used ones. If he doesn't like you, he will start acting funny -- like an engine with a clogged carburetor. For instance, he may begin by not coming to work on time. If he starts disappearing right when you have to leave for an urgent appointment, you'll know that he is doing it deliberately to irritate you. When you cannot stand him anymore and tell him point blank you're firing him, he will gladly ask you for three months of salary by way of compensation.

And for people like myself, hiring a permanent driver simply doesn't suit my lifestyle. In my case, I do not go out every day of the week, as I do most of my work at home. On those days when I stay home, what do I need a driver for? What's even worse, my family and I may end up going out not because we really need to, but because we have a car and a driver who's sitting there doing nothing.

So, what are the options? Well, one option is sell the car and rely on Bajaj, Kopaja, Metro Mini, ojek, taxis, buses, and other forms of public transportation. But even if I could tolerate the discomfort, the pickpockets, the smoke and the heat, at certain times of the day they wouldn't be there anyway. Try to hail a taxi after 4:30 p.m. in the Central Business District. And then you may have to haggle about the fare, as the cabby may refuse to use the meter.

The conclusion? Once in a while we do need a car and a driver. There are a growing number of brokers in Jakarta that will provide us with a temporary driver for as long as we wish -- with no strings attached.

"These drivers are very well-mannered, and they are decently dressed, too." Edith Loupathy, a staff member at the British Embassy said. Edith was the one who told me about these 'driver clubs' and gave me the phone number of one of them, and I really thank her for the invaluable information.

"It's really a good idea," another friend said when I told him about it. "Sometimes we have relatives from out of town visiting us. We have the car but no time to take them around. Now they can see the city in our car, and we still can go to work as usual."

These driver clubs are clearly the best solution. They also force me to organize my schedule properly. For example, I take my Dad to the bank to pick up his pension, go to Glodok to browse around inside Computer City, stop by Graffiti Bookstore in Slipi Jaya to pick up all the computer magazines they reserve for me, and do a number of other chores all in a single day. That way, I can use the driver's time optimally. Oh, don't worry, I know I should not make him drive around as if he were Superman and never got tired.

Maulana Drivers Club, organized by Pak Haji Maulana, will charge you Rp 15,000 for an eight-hour day. If you need the service beyond that, there will be a Rp 1,500 per hour overtime charge. After three hours of working overtime, you're supposed to give him a Rp 2,000 extra for his dinner. If he goes home after 9:00 p.m., you'll have to provide him with another Rp 5,000 transportation money. That's fair. Sometimes the driver will ask you for another Rp 3,000 to get to your place, but it's up to you. Anyway, the club charges a membership fee of Rp 2,000 per day from their drivers.

Pak Kodrat Sugeng, more popularly known among his so many customers as Mr. Kaes, only collects Rp 1,000 per day from his own drivers. His rates are comparable to Maulana's. Mr. Kaes considers himself the king of driver clubs, as he organized the first driver club ever in Jakarta some eleven years ago. Today, many of his former drivers have formed their own clubs. "That doesn't really matter, though. We are more of a non-profit organization, we help each other," he said.

If you don't like the driver the club has assigned to you today, you can call them and ask them to assign another person tomorrow. "Although not very often, we do receive complaints from our customers," Mbak Ita, Maulana's manager, told me when I visited their headquarters one day. "We'll just send another driver over the next day. We try to make our customers happy, since this is a very competitive type of service," she added.

While Mr. Kaes' headquarters are in Jalan Bangka, Maulana's is in the Cilandak area. According to Mbak Ita, there are currently more than twenty such clubs in South Jakarta alone. Still in the Jalan Bangka area, for example, you can find Ifkar's Driver Club, which sets its rates in U.S. dollars and offers premium services for a price. Most of the people who are likely to require their service live in this area.

"We organize ourselves more like a family," Mr. Kaes told me. That was also what Pak Haji Maulana said. "When there's a death in the family of any of our members, we collect donations and visit the mourning family together," he added.

Both in Kaes' and Maulana's clubs, new members are accepted mostly by way of recommendation from old ones. They must have three year's experience and not be too young. Unfortunately, there's no other screening process involved. And because it's not a professional association, customers cannot hold the clubs liable if a member happens to get involved in an accident. As you would have also guessed, they don't offer any insurance, either.

How do the drivers themselves like this working arrangement? Pak Parno, one of the drivers, told me, "The arrangement suits lazy people like myself perfectly. When I'm short of money, I will report to the club, get an order, and start working. Then I may work for a couple of days in a row. When I feel too tired to work, I just stay home. It's so flexible. I love it."

Some of the drivers have preferences, too. "I like my Japanese customers very much. They are so polite. When I leave for home, they usually bow to me and say 'Thank you so much, Dadang-san,'" Pak Dadang, another member of the club said. "I don't like it when the customers just sit there in the back seat and don't say anything to me. If they ask me to come again the next day, I'll usually tell them I already have another assignment."

But once in a while they get a big surprise, too. "I didn't believe it at first, but it was true. I had to pick up Liz Taylor from Soekarno-Hatta yesterday," Pak Dadang told me proudly one day. "She was here and nobody knew about it except the people who met her at the airport and myself."

The story among these drivers has it that the more difficult customers are usually Indonesians. Pak Hidayat, another driver, told me that one day, because the lady customer was so cerewet, his friend, who was driving her car, got fed up, pulled up, parked on the side of the road and went home on the bus.

But if you treat them decently, they will make you happy. So far, I have enjoyed the service of several of these drivers, and all of them were experienced drivers who drove well and knew Jakarta. Some of them, like Pak Dadang, can even communicate in English, too.