Wirelessly posted (Android: Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 1.5; en-us; T-Mobile G1 Build/CRC1) AppleWebKit/528.5+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.2 Mobile Safari/525.20.1)

One other option that hasn't been mentioned yet: Do you have a smartphone or web-enabled device? My Android-powered G1 has a program called "cab4me" that determines my location (based on GPS) and then displays a list of local taxi companies/car services. I assume that similar programs are available for the iPhone, BlackBerry, etc.



With that said, I agree that I suspect you will encounter almost uniformly positive responses by altering your query from "please call a cab for me" to, "I'm sorry, but do you know what the best way to get a taxi from here would be?" Those who would have reacted well will still be willing to help, but less over-achieving security staff will likely take less offense to a question phrased this way.