For the life of me I cannot seem to find the background and origin of the common phrase “taking someone for a ride.” Everyone agrees that it is an idiomatic expression meaning to cheat or deceive someone, but no one can seem to tell me if it comes from the world of taxis, or buses, or some other form of transportation, or nothing like those at all.
I am, though, quite confident that no one has ever taken their bride for a ride quite like I have.
I place all the blame/credit on the fact that I am frugal or, as my children derisively refer to it, “cheap.”
Our church recently purchased a used floor scrubber with which to clean the floor of our 10,000-square-foot church gymnasium/family life center. We purchased it for $350, which I was fairly pleased with seeing that it was a $14,000 machine when brand new. A local fiberglass plant was closing down and liquidating everything, and we bought it from them. In that environment it had, obviously, lived a very hard life. Nonetheless I was confident that it would quite easily do the job that we needed it to do.
Last Friday afternoon, we scrubbed the entire floor, let it soak for a bit and then attempted to use the machine to squeegee and suck the water up. It was then that we realized that the machine simply moved the water around without actually sucking it up. It only took me a few moments to figure out that the lid was not sealing down tightly and was therefore causing the unit to lose suction.