Hey, Taxi!

Silver Service

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 17:44:32 GMT

Two Taxis
Originally uploaded by skyring

There are a few places where I don’t go late in the evening. Some nightclubs have a reputation for drunken violence, and while I appreciate that their patrons have a need to get home, I’ve had too many scares to go seeking them out.

I delivered a family to a late dinner at a Thai restaurant, and here, fresh out of the boisterous nightclub beside it, was a beefy chap in his mid thirties, staggering on his feet and slurred in his speech. I am not obliged to accept passengers under the influence of alcohol or drugs, and this chap looked to be a prime example of the distressed drinker at the far end of both sobriety and money.

But, frankly, on a Saturday night, if I confined myself to sober gentlefolk, I’d have a very thin time of it indeed.

Besides, there was something about this chap. Perhaps it was the fact that he’d already stumbled into the front seat, having some difficulty getting his limbs to do what he wanted.

I sighed. “Where to?”

With any luck, he’d be headed back into the city, where I would have no trouble finding a fresh passenger.

“Theodore,” he slurred.

Great. Another few suburbs further out. No chance of a fare back at this time of night.

At least I was driving a nice car. It’s a pleasure to drive in Canberra, an even greater pleasure in a limousine, leather seats and lots of goodies.

Yes, I’m back driving Silver Service again. I started off the night driving a standard Ford Falcon in Canberra Cabs livery temporarily wearing the plates of Taxi 58, my lovely Fairlane that I bent a couple of weeks back. The evening rush had died down, and I was waiting on Manuka rank sipping a takeaway cappuccino from Artoven.

Got a call from the owner, who asked me to bring the car into the workshop, a few minutes away. When I arrived, he asked me to log off, and resume my shift in my Fairlane, freshly repaired and repainted. “Not 100%,” said the mechanic, “and we’ll get you to bring it back tomorrow for some more work.”

I didn’t mind. Getting back into Silver Service uniform, driving a nicer car, being a chauffeur rather than a driver - I can put up with a lot for that privilege.

While I was swapping my kit over, Fred, another one of the owner’s regular drivers, wandered in. “Some galah just wiped off the side of my taxi,” he complained. “They didn’t give right of way. Look at the car!”

Taxi 8 was looking very sad, scrapes along the side, door bent, side mirror hanging off loose.

And here was the mechanic, unscrewing the plates from the cab I'd just vacated, moving them to my Fairlane, and then taking the plates off the damaged Taxi 8 to screw onto the unhurt Falcon. It was musical taxis!

The bottom line was that we were both back on the road and earning money again within a few minutes. That’s the taxi business for you - get the drivers out on the road, passengers in the seats, wheels turning, meter running. Sometimes it’s like a racetrack pits, with sets of tires swapped over in five minutes, brakes changed in the blink of an eye. It’s rare that a taxi engine gets cold.

I hurried home, changed my uniform from Canberra Cabs blue to the more upmarket grey and white of Silver Service, quickly ran the car through the carwash to get rid of the workshop’s dust, and was busy earning money again, a happy smile on my face.

So, some hours later I was keeping a wary eye on my very drunk passenger as we headed for the outer suburbs. He wanted to talk. Trouble was that he was having difficulty finding the words and getting them out. He was sozzled.

I’d had Dave Brubeck playing piano jazz on the iPhone video, but I sized up this chap, decided he wasn’t a jazz man, and selected Dire Straits “Sultans of Swing” instead. He was fascinated.

“Wozzat?”

I explained how I’d loaded music videos into my computer and then used iTunes to transfer them across to the iPhone.

“Whaffor? Ya watch it while yer drivin’?”

“No, I’ve seen them all before. I like the music, but the videos are for the passengers.”

He looked at me. And then back to the video. Mark Knopfler is a genius with the guitar.

“Why?”

“For people to watch and enjoy. Make them happy. I work on the basis that a happy passenger equals a happy cabbie.”

He pondered this for a while.

“But why?”

Why was I explaining my life philosophy to a drunken man, I wondered. In the morning he’d have a fuzzy head and maybe a dim memory of a mad cabbie who spruiked gibberish in the middle of the night.

“Life’s too short to be unhappy and uncomfortable. I like what I do, I like getting people home safely, and if we’re all happy, then it’s not a job, it’s a joy. I feel I’ve done something good in the world.”

He looked at me.

“I’ve been in seven countries, lived in five states, and ridden in hundreds of taxis, and you’re the only one to do something like that.” He gestured at the iPhone.

“I’m an officer in the army, and I’m just back from Afghanistan,” he continued, “and I’m the same. I do my best, I do a good job. And nobody cares.”

I looked at him. He might have been far gone in drink, but there was a light burning in his eyes that I generally don’t see in my passengers. It all came into focus in that moment.

Me, I’m a dilettante. My life isn’t dangerous or difficult. I aim for happiness all round, and I generally achieve it. Parking my bottom on soft leather seats, setting the climate control to comfortable, and driving on wide empty roads with romantic songs lazing in my ears, that’s no chore. My overseas holidays are spent strolling along picturesque boulevards, browsing through bookshops and art galleries, sampling the local wines.

This man beside me, his time abroad is spent in danger and dirt, hot sun and freezing rain, a set of camouflage fatigues his everyday wear. The best years of his life are spent in the service of his country, fighting unspeakable evil. He’s doing the best he can, and if he feels the need for a relaxing drink or two, then I’ll not begrudge him that.

I pulled up outside his suburban home, he opened the door and wobbled up the drive, and I saluted his departing form.

Maybe I was driving Silver Service, but this man was solid gold.

What a world!

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 17:35:16 GMT

Air
Originally uploaded by skyring

I picked up a chap from Fraser yesterday evening. One of Canberra's fringe suburbs, maybe fifteen minutes' drive from Civic, assuming no traffic congestion, which is a safe bet most of the day and all of the night. There's one long, looping street which is open on one side. Parkland, stretching out into farmland flowing over the border into New South Wales, the rolling hills rising into mountains in the distance.

A very pleasant outlook. I passed a chap sitting in the gloaming beside the road, just sitting on a bench, the glow of a laptop open on his lap. And a little white apple symbol shining out of the grey metal case. He was using a MacBook Air!

Maybe he was checking his email, maybe writing up some university homework, maybe composing a sonnet to his love. I was too far away to see more than a glow from the screen, but whatever it was, it looked so very romantic in the fading twilight, the land spreading out before him.

What a science fiction world we live in nowadays. Twenty years ago, the thought of a computer small and light enough enough to slip into an envelope was fantasy. Nowadays, the average mobile phone has about the same processing power as a Cray supercomputer. Teenagers buy a fresh one every year.

My cab is full of cameras that see in the dark, computers that link me with bank networks, little boxes that communicate with satellites to tell me exactly where I am. In another few years, I joke to my passengers, there won't be any need for a cabbie. Just a GPS system, a cruise control button, and a credit card slot.

I dropped my passenger off at a club - it was the big game on television tonight, the deciding match in the interstate football series - and found a quiet rank, where I had a few minutes to pull out my own MacBook Air from beside the seat, plug in the wireless modem, and upload a new program file to the FaceBook application I'm working on.

What a world we live in.

Carrying the wait

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 02:28:48 GMT

Norman Riding
Originally uploaded by skyring

The first job of a taxidriving day is always a bit of a gamble. The sight of the car parked outside the day driver’s house remains a thrill, even after so long driving. It’s a new adventure, twelve hours of unexpected people and places, every shift different. I might spend the night within a few kilometres of Parliament House, I might make several interstate trips, I could find myself drawn into the outlying suburbs and never get back to my usual haunts. The empty cab, freshly cleaned and gassed up, is a promise of adventure.

I transfer my kit over to the taxi, switch on and settle in. I hook up my iPhone and its Bluetooth box, sit RingBear on the dashboard, fill the centre console with torch, chewing gum, cologne, Leatherman, polishing cloth and camera, and tuck a novel under the seat. Sometimes I bring along my MacBook Air in its protective sleeve.

I do the paperwork, noting the odometer and taximeter readings, whether the car is clean, fill in the date, my name and so on, and then tuck the envelope into the console. During the shift I’ll stuff it with receipts and dockets, and twelve hours later I’ll write down the final totals.

I sign on to the various computers. Despatch system, two credit card terminals. They all want my license number and a code.

And then I plot into a radio zone, ready for work.

As I say, it’s a gamble. All over Canberra, night drivers are logging on, looking for their first job of the day. And passengers have been calling the taxi base, putting in requests for taxis. There will also be timed bookings, requests made days or hours before for pickups, usually to the airport.

If there are more drivers than jobs, then I’ll have to wait for my first work, or drive to a rank for someone to walk up to my cab.

On the other hand, if there are more passengers than cabs, I’ll be offered work immediately. This is where it gets chancy. When there are few cabs and many passengers, delays build up. Passengers get fed up with waiting for their booked cab and hail down one off the street, or from a rank. The cabbie who finally accepts the booking is going to go short, not to mention the lost time spent driving to the pick up address and waiting for a passenger.

So, when I sign on to the system to be offered an immediate job, I’m suspicious. This happened last shift. I logged into the O’Connor zone and immediately the computer warbled at me with a job. Chances were that the pickup point would be towards the centre of town, and I’d be heading that way anyway, so I hit the “Accept” button.

And groaned when I saw the details. The job was forty-five minutes old. In that time, my passenger would likely have found alternate transport, or be very unhappy when I finally arrived. Naturally, I’d be blamed for the delay.

The address was a medical centre that was a little out of the way of passing cabs, so I didn’t give up hope entirely on arrival when nobody was waiting for me in the declining winter afternoon. I slowly cruised around the centre, looking for anybody who might be looking for me. And when I returned to the main entrance, there was.

She was an old lady, white hair and walking stick. I stopped the cab and bounced out to give her a hand.

“Hold on to me, dearie,” she said. “I’m full of steroids and all wobbly.”

I did my best to be a rock for her, holding the door steady while she settled in. Always happy to tuck a lady into the front seat, reaching in to hold the seatbelt out, checking that her dress is clear of the door and then closing it firmly for her.

“You’ve been waiting a long time?”

“Yes, but that’s all right. I was sitting down inside out of the cold. I had to wait three hours for the car repair man last week.”

I looked at her.

“I’m 94, and still driving,” she said proudly. “Just down to the shops and back, but I’ve still got my license.”

I apologised for the delay on behalf of the company. It might not be my fault, but passengers like their inconvenience to be recognised officially. A sympathetic soul can amend hours of anxious waiting.

We chatted about the early days. My passenger had been born long before Canberra was the national capital, but she’d been born in the region. Back when she was a schoolgirl, there would have been just the Canberry church and a few lonely farms here. No Lake Burley Griffin, no Black Mountain Tower, no Parliamentary Triangle. And no three hundred and fifty thousand people living in sprawling suburbs.

Just bare sheep paddocks, scattered stands of gum trees, and the sleepy Molonglo River winding along.

I warmed to her. She liked talking, she had stories to tell, and her wit and intelligence was sparkling keen.

And she’d travelled the world. I love hearing traveller’s tales.

“I’ve been across to California twenty five times,” she told me.

I looked at her. That’s a long and tiring trip over the Pacific.

“My second husband was an American, and we lived just south of Los Angeles airport in a three level house overlooking the beach.”

She went on to tell of how she had fallen in love with the ex-soldier during a visit to the USA. He had been an officer in an armoured regiment with Patton’s Third Army during WW2, and one summer they had rented a caravan, and driven from Utah Beach all the way into Germany, retracing her husband’s wartime path through France, over the Rhine into the heavily defended Metz area, and into the ruins of the defeated land.

“He recognised everything, every little patch of woods, every village, and oh, he had such stories to tell!”

I wanted to drive on and on with this delightful lady, listening to her clear voice and romantic stories. Her childhood home, Californian beaches, the bocage country of Normandy, Paris and the Rhineland. We could do it off the meter. But instead we pulled up at her neat suburban house and she directed me where to park to avoid the steps.

She showed me her driver’s license when she paid the fare. Sure enough, there was a birthdate before the First World War, and her photograph smiling out. “Look at how the background hides my white hair!”

She was beautiful in person, white hair fully visible as a nimbus around her happy face in the late afternoon sun when I helped her out of the car, and gave her my arm to the front door.

As I pulled out of the drive, she stood at the window and waved to me. I blew her a kiss and smiled off down the hill for my next passenger.

With a start like that, a twelve hour shift is a breeze. I finish at three in the morning, scrape the ice off my windscreen and drive off, an inner glow lighting and warming me home as I think on the people I meet and the places we visit.

On the Ball

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 05:46:07 GMT

Mooseheads
Originally uploaded by skyring

I rarely pick up from the Belconnen Soccer Club. For one thing, I try to steer clear of Belconnen as a whole. It's a long way from Manuka, Artoven and their wonderful cappuccino. The main cab rank at the Belconnen Town Centre is a dismal place, blank concrete walls on one side, a cold empty park on the other. A product of the Seventies and architectural brutalism. In contrast, Manuka is full of life and outdoor cafes, people strolling or dining, visiting the boutique bookshop, window-shopping, emerging from the cinemas, eyes full of romance.

Belconnen's not my cup of coffee.

But I happened to get a job out to Belconnen, and instead of driving back to civilisation empty, I hung around on a slow night.

It was just me on the rank. Reading a programming manual and wondering if my despatch screen software had taken itself off to another planet.

Finally a "cover job" popped up. Not in my radio booking zone, but close enough that I could get there to collect the passenger before they froze solid waiting for a cab. I hit it without too much thought - anything to relieve the boredom and winch myself closer to my night's target by a few dollars.

Belconnen Soccer Club. Scene of one of my earliest taxi disasters from my first days of cabbing. Too painful to revisit now, but in my inexperience I inconvenienced passengers, made them pay more than they should, drove them around more than they needed, and ended up with a shopping bag full of what I hope was urine slowly leaking onto the floor in the back. Don’t ask.

I found the way in and curved smoothly into the pickup point outside the main doors. My passenger was waiting for me, a lone man, several years older than me.

He got into the front seat, nominated a Gungahlin address, and we moved off in that direction, a little guidance required when we almost missed a turn and headed off in the direction of Charnwood instead.

Back on track, I settled down to scrolling through the GPS display to find a street that might match the mumbled name I'd been given. Beep. Beep. Beep. It sounded each button push as I scrolled in and out and moved around, my eyes stealing seconds from the road.

"I can direct you," my passenger said.

I gave up trying to find the route, and relaxed. I generally find that passengers like this have given the exact same directions to hundreds of cabbies and know the precise best way home.

"Got to do something," my passenger said. "Can't sit at home all the time, getting bored."

"That's OK. Everyone's entitled to a few drinks at the club."

"Been doing this long?"

"Oh, about eighteen months," I replied. "Five nights a week, twelve hour shifts. Standard for a night cabbie."

I usually get a gasp at that. Usually another when I mention that I finish about three in the morning. Not from this chap.

"Still live with your parents?"

I chuckled. My parents are interstate, both retired. Still, it's nice to be mistaken for a young man. I must tell my barber he's a genius.

"I'm in my fifties," I replied.

We talked about children living at home for a while. His were in their thirties, long gone, mine within a year or so of twenty, still at home, though gaining more and more independence. One day they'll fly off for nests of their own, but in the meantime I'm enjoying their company.

I uncertainly approached an intersection, waiting for his direction, and after he pointed me right, he observed, "You're not from around here, are you?"

I named an inner suburb, one where house prices in excess of a million dollars are not unheard of.

"Why are you driving a cab? You must be pretty well off."

I'm not usually interrogated by my customers. People take cabbies for granted. Pick up the phone, call a number, someone appears with a taxi. Perception of another life beyond the steering wheel is a rarity.

I paused a moment. The morning papers had listed an amazing new high for an industrial stock in which I held a nice package of shares. Over the past year I'd probably made the equivalent of a moderate lottery prize. On paper, at any rate. Certainly far more than I'd made in a year of long night shifts.

"I like it," I replied.

And I do. It's not hard work, I get to talk to an amazing variety of people, I get to drive in bus lanes, I can sit on the Franklin Street rank in Manuka nibbling on one of Artoven's superior rock cakes while I listen to Harry Chapin, I can do any of hundreds of things that are streets ahead of watching television at home, or sozzling myself on cheap beer in a football club. And only the previous day I'd picked up a young lady for the Press Gallery's annual Midwinter Ball at Parliament House.

I'd gasped as she came out of the darkness, opened my door and sat down beside me. She was gorgeous in a few stylish wisps of black clothing. I sighed in delight. "Not every day I get to drive a princess," I told her.

She smiled in return. "Oooh, I like you. You can stay with me all night."

Sharing a few minutes with a princess as we cruise the Parliamentary Triangle. That’s priceless. I dropped her off at the Ministerial Entrance for her to collect her date for the night, some lucky prince of power.

It's the princesses, the brides, the happy singing students, the philosophers, the jazz fans, the tourists. They all entertain me. And vice versa. Maybe they admire the way I shimmy past a line of traffic and catch the bus lane light. Maybe they admire my offbeat taste in music. Maybe they like the photographs of Paris or Barcelona or Waikiki or Hong Kong that appear on my iPod screen. Maybe it's the way I laugh at their jokes. I certainly entertain them.

No. I was wrong. I don't like my job as a night cab driver.

I love it.

Lemon driver

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 04:39:09 GMT

My elite cab
Originally uploaded by skyring

He was waiting at the club carpark entrance: elderly, a bit shabby. I stopped beside him, he opened the door, sat down beside me, and gave a nearby address.

“Only a short ride,” he said, apologetically.

Possibly a cabbie’s worst possible passenger. Only two things could have been worse - a trolley load of groceries to load and unload, and a 50% disablity voucher entitling the bearer to half off the fare.

I’d been sitting on the Manuka rank, moving my way to the front of the line, and simultaneously moving up in the zone queue for radio work. Eventually someone would walk up to my cab, or base would tell me to go somewhere for a job.

This was a radio pick-up when I was already at the head of the rank, and I’d considered whether to reject the work in favour of staying where I was for a guaranteed customer, rather than drive off for a passenger who might have found alternate transport, or have given a wrong address, or just decided that they didn’t want a cab after all.

It was a slow part of the night, so I accepted the job, inwardly groaning when I saw the pick up address. A golf club right on the far edge of my radio zone. I’d have to drive five minutes just to get there to see if I had a passenger. This time of night, he’d likely have a few drinks inside him. Maybe there was more than one raucous drunk. maybe there was nobody - another cab could deliver a passenger and scoop mine up in the process in the time it would take me to arrive. Maybe the cabbie would pretend that he had been called to pick up the fare, more likely the uncaring passenger would just jump into the first cab to show up.

But when I arrived, my passenger was waiting for me, and he’d taken the trouble to walk out to the entrance.

“Only a short ride,” he said, “but I’ve got a crook leg, you see.”

“You don’t have to apologise for a short fare,” I told him. “Everybody has the exact same need to get to where they need to be. The cab industry isn’t set up to make cabbies rich, it’s so people can get home. Or to the airport. Or the doctor.”

And that’s the way it is. My standard response. It’s the gamble I take every day as a cabbie. A job might be a long forty, fifty, sixty dollar fare. Or it might be a six dollar fare around the corner. I’ve long since stopped caring much about it. On average, it all works out.

I was smiling at him. Ok, it was a short ride. That didn’t mean it was going to be a bitter experience. Regardless of the money, I aim for a smile at the end of the trip. that’s my real reward. Getting this gent home safely and comfortably would make us both happy.

He looked at me a little oddly. “Most cabbies don’t like a short trip.”

His eyes twinkled in recollection as I reversed out, turned onto the main road and headed off to the traffic lights.

“I used to get this one cabbie to pick me up, and I told him each time that I’d give him a couple of bucks extra, he’d still be grumpy. He’d say how long he had had to wait, and he wouldn’t get a fare back and he’d have to wait even longer for his next passenger. Grumble all the way home, he did.”

“Yeah,” I said, “but that’s not your fault. You ring for a cab, you don’t know what the driver’s been doing for the last half hour. He might have just dropped his last passenger around the corner. All you want is a cab and someone to drive it.”

“One day,” he went on, “one of my mates give me a bag of lemons off the tree in his back yard. He had more than he needed, you see. So when this cabbie drove me home, I give him the fare, and I give him a lemon as well. He said ‘what’s this for?’ and I said, ‘It’s because you’re always so bloody sour!’ And now we get on just fine.”

I chuckled. Through the lights, round a corner and home. Not a long trip, but too long to walk in the cold and the dark for an old man with a crook leg. We smiled at each other. He gave me the fare and a couple of dollars extra. No lemons.

My next job was a long one, all the way down to Gowrie. It all evens out.

My lovely silver limousine is still in the workshop. Instead I’ve got a car which is a bit of a lemon. It works fine, engine-wise, but some of the controls and dashboard lights are dodgy, the cruise control doesn’t function, the radio warbles, and to close the driver’s door I have to hold the handle just so and heave it shut. And, as you can see from the photograph, the door trim is held on by tape.

But I’m smiling. The taxi industry isn’t set up to make cabbies rich, but it makes this one very happy.

Pure genius

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 05:37:36 GMT

Bear on the Bench
Originally uploaded by skyring

The call came at two in the morning. An address in a nearby suburb, and I pulled my car out of the stationary line of cabs on the main city rank. Sometimes it’s better to take a chance on a passenger being at the pick-up address than to wait half an hour for a guaranteed fare.

The idea is to have the wheels turning and someone in the passenger seat. If you are alone in the cab, you are losing money. I won’t say that any passenger is better than none, but I’m not in this game to sit idle on a rank, or driving around uselessly burning up gas.

I cruised up and down the street. It was number 1/9 that I was looking for, and as so often happens, none of the houses had visible street numbers. The roof-mounted sidelights were blazing away, but picking up nothing in the way of digits. I might have to stop the car and get out to look closely at the letterboxes with a torch.

At last I spotted a number in faded brown paint, but it was just a house, not a block of flats with separate numbered apartments. Maybe there was a granny flat down the back, but the house itself was dark.

I waited five minutes, but no passenger came out. I looked at the job screen again. The call had been taken by the idiot voice-recognition system, which meant that the passenger would have given the street address as “One of Nine Long Street”. Before I marked the job as a no-show, I decided to check out the other end of the street, just in case the passenger had said “One Oh Nine Long Street” and been misunderstood by the system.

Sure enough, there were four figures waiting for me. They had been sent a text message saying that I was on the way, and had come outside in the cold for the cab, supposedly only seconds away. The problem was that the auto-generated message depended on the car’s GPS position getting within a certain distance of the pick-up address, and if the pick-up address was wrong, the passengers would get a heads-up text message but no taxi.

But my passengers were wearing those magical alcohol overcoats and were feeling no pain.

“Civic,” one said.

“Kingston,” ordered another.

“Driver,” a third asked, “do you know any good nightspots?”

“Tuggeranong,” I replied confidently. Canberra’s southernmost town centre was a good thirty minute ride away.

There were snorts of amusement from the back seat.

“If nothing’s open down there,” I went on,”we can always drive back to Kingston. Kingston’s rocking.”

And it was. My previous job had been a couple of party animals from Kingston into Civic. I seem to spend a lot of my time as a taxi driver just shuttling people between the same two destinations.

“OK. Kingston. Direct.”

And off we went. This time, my slideshow of “happy holiday snaps” on the iPhone attracted no attention. My young passengers were cheerful and happy in their own company, poking each other in the ribs, exchanging jokes, just enjoying the ride as we passed over Commonwealth Avenue Bridge and the floodlit buildings lining Lake Burley-Griffin attracted eyes.

Suddenly there was a shriek from the back seat. “Oooooh, that’s gaudy!”

Dignified and impressive, I thought, rather than gaudy, but who am I to argue with passengers?

“It’s that house in Barcelona, isn’t it?”

Oh yeah. Right. My iPhone was displaying a photograph of one of the distinctive chimney pots of the Casa Milà, an apartment building in Spain, designed by the Catalan architect Antonio Gaudi.

Turned out that one of the passengers was a huge fan of Gaudi, and as soon as she could scrape together the money, she was going to visit Barcelona, where there are several buildings designed by Gaudi, not to mention the Park Guell containing some amazing landscaping features. Of course, his greatest work remains unfinished: the immense Sagrada Famiglia cathedral.

Even now his work is extraordinary in every sense of the word, but back at the turn of the last century in the days of Queen Victoria, nobody was sure if he was a nut or a genius.

His inspiration was the natural world, and his buildings are light on straight, and heavy on shapes reminiscent of seed pods, rippling dunes, lizard scales, twining vines and a thousand other patterns and forms from the rural landscape of his childhood. Nowadays, each of his buildings are surrounded and filled by winding lines of tourists, but in his day the Park Guell housing development was an expensive failure.

Even as I write these words, I’m drinking coffee from a mug bought in a souvenir shop opposite the incredible cathedral. It is patterned in the broken crockery mosaic that is a feature of much of Gaudi’s work, and stuck on tiles fractalise some of his designs. I’m a fan, and if I live another half-century, I would like to return to Barcelona to worship in the finished cathedral.

We enthused over Gaudi for the rest of the trip. I flipped to and fro on my iPhone, trying to find a photograph of RingBear sitting on one of the benches in Park Guell, a sinuous affair that is probably the longest piece of public seating in the world. Couldn’t find it before we arrived in Kingston, but here it is above, my furry co-driver sitting on a work of art.

I’m a lucky man. Here in Canberra, home to five universities, there are any number of extremely well educated people. Chances are that my passengers will share an enthusiasm of mine, or better yet, be able to teach me something I don’t already know.

I’ll pick up some dodgy looking folk in black turtlenecks late at night, and before I know it, we’re talking of jazz, or existentialism, or the pre-Raphaelites. Or maybe I’ll learn something about performance cars or football, bricklaying or cheerleading. I never know. But I do by the end of the trip.

Sand in my taxi

Sun, 15 Jun 2008 03:12:47 GMT

RingBear in Port Said
Originally uploaded by skyring

I’ve recently bought a new laptop. My iPhone is so cool that I’ve been looking at Apple products with fresh eyes, and the MacBook Air was too elegant not to buy to replace my cranky Vista machine.

A chunk of money, but I’m having so much fun with my new Mac that I don’t care. This website is one of the results.

However, the process of switching from PC to Mac is not without problems. Syncing my iPhone to a different iTunes lost me all my playlists. Granted, I can set up fresh ones quickly, but for just a night I was left without. I chose random shuffle on all songs and for the rest of the night I was wondering what track would play next. Rocky Horror Picture Show or Locattelli. German kinder songs or Bill Haley.

A great conversation starter, though, and when “Time Warp” came up on the shuffle on the way to Queanbeyan, it started a wonderful conversation with a chap just off the bus from Sydney on cult classics and Seventies culture. My cab ride must have cost him twice the Sydney bus fare, but my passenger still gave me a generous tip at the end of the ride, when I dropped him outside the kebab shop.

If I’m not playing a music video (and I’m not called the Abba Cabbie for nothing, you know), then I’ll have a slideshow of my travel photographs running on the iPhone while the shuffle picks the music. Passengers will sit and watch this, and sometimes a photograph will spark a discussion. “Geez, that bear’s been around!” is a typical comment, because a lot of the photographs show RingBear posed in front of the Eiffel Tower, amongst a field of Texas bluebonnets, looking down on Hong Kong, sitting on the dock of the bay, Alcatraz in the background...

I got to talking about Paris one night, with a young lady public servant, and we enthused about travel for a while. I’m getting to have some knowledge about the world and its people, but I trust that I’m not turning into a bore.

“Have you been there?” she asked, after a slide showed a ‘Welcome to Egypt’ sign, with RingBear relaxing in the last rays of the African sun.

“Just for a few minutes in Port Said,” I said, “And I spent a day in Sharm El Sheik, but that hardly counts.”

“I just asked, because I’ve just come back from Egypt and Morocco. Last week, I was in the Sahara, living with a nomad family.”

My jaw dropped open. Paris and Washington are all very fine, but small potatoes compared to this. And just last week!

She went on to tell me how she and her mother had gone on a tour through North Africa, and she had liked Morocco so much that after seeing her mother onto a plane home, she had gone back into the desert for a longer and deeper experience. She described the empty landscape, the unworldly evenings out in the open, the opportunities for personal reflection so far away from the noise and distractions of civilisation.

And the people of the desert. “I started teaching the children the alphabet,” she said, “Sitting down with them, drawing the shapes of the letters and saying their names. And after a while, I’d glance up to see the camel herdsmen standing behind me, looking over my shoulder. By the end of the morning, they were sitting down with the children.”

I was charmed. Here was the Sahara floating into my midnight cab, the sights and sands drifting in and settling over the curves of the dashboard. Northbourne Avenue turned into a dusty track, the moonlight sculpting the dunes into frozen waves of flowing art.

And there was aso Canberra dropped into the middle of the Sahara, an al fresco classroom run by a public servant on holiday.

What a wide, wonderful world we live in. Never question why I drive a cab. It’s for the travel.

We pulled up in a tree-lined street, the fallen leaves thick in the grass, and I watched her slender figure vanish through the shrubs in the front garden. I could think of another reason why nomadic camel herders would want to spend time in the company of a delightful young woman. Everything about her would have been doubly entrancing and exotic to them, and they would listen to her foreign voice as she told of kangaroos and meat pies, the stars upside down and the golden wattle in the springtime.

No, it’s not the travel. It’s the people who make my job a delight.

I sighed happily, pushed a few buttons on my iPod, and Dido’s sweet voice filled my taxi:
I could get on a plane and fly away
From the road where the cars never stop going through the night
To a life where I can watch the sun set and take my time, take all our time.

I've still got sand in my shoes and I can't shake the thought of you
I should get on, forget you but why would I want to...

Strike a light

Sun, 15 Jun 2008 03:00:27 GMT

Lightbulb
Originally uploaded by skyring

I’ve been driving a different car each night, as the owner tries to cope with the havoc I’ve wreaked upon his fleet, rearranging and relocating cars and drivers. Some of the cars have been very ordinary indeed, with missing bits and pieces, hand-scrawled instructions to drivers on how to lock the doors by holding the handle a certain way, credit card terminals that constantly reboot while a bemused passenger looks on. All a bit of an adventure, really, and I get a payoff late at night when I vacuum out each new car, raise the rear seat cushion and shine my little torch around underneath to find a few golden dollars of loose change.

I ran into another driver on the main rank, and he showed me a broken grille where he had had a minor bingle on a notorious roundabout a few hours previously. He’d immediately rung the owner, saying, “I know you’ve had a bad week, but...”

Anyway, I’m happy to drive, so long as the car works. I don’t need cruise control or a CD player or leather seats. Just a passenger to get from A to B and a smile at the end of it.

Last night’s car had a blown headlight bulb, which only became apparent after the evening closed in and I started noticing that it was getting awfully dim in front of the car. Not a real problem for driving in Canberra’s well-lit streets, but if I got a long fare to an outlying area and I needed every pixel of illumination to spot the kangaroos, it would be a strain. Also, if I got noticed by a police patrol, they could put me off the road until I got it fixed, maybe issue a defect advice.

I put off replacing the bulb until the passenger flow diminished and I could squeeze out a few minutes. I can go “on hold” on the despatch system for up to ten minutes, which lets me refuel or grab a cup of coffee without losing my place in the queue for radio work. Trouble is that in the past I’ve had to grapple with these fiddly light fittings, a torch in my teeth, scraping my knuckles in the confined space for twenty minutes or half an hour before getting the old bulb out and the new bulb in.

I hit the Braddon servo, gassed up and selected a new bulb when I paid for the gas. The owner gives us a card to pay for gas, but anything extra, like airfreshener, cleaning supplies, minor repairs, we have to pay up front and get reimbursed. I looked at my watch. Five minutes left on my hold time and counting down. Should I try now, or wait for a quieter period?

No time like the present. I raised the bonnet, felt around for the light socket, squeezed the plug loose, pulled off the rubber seal, undid the wire catch and slid out the old bulb. Reversed the process to fit the replacement. Turned on the lights to test, dropped the bonnet and drove off, punching the air inside my taxi and shouting out “Supercabbie!”. Total time for bulb change, one minute!

It was like my old days as a soldier, when I could strip and reassemble a machinegun in a matter of seconds, click, click, click, my hands a blur.

Back onto the main rank to wait for my next job. I jotted down the figures for the gas refuel, litres and dollars, and looked for the separate receipt to note down the price of the bulb against the owner’s costs.

Ooops. No receipt. In my haste I’d left it on the counter. Without documentation, I’d have to pay for the bulb out of my own pocket, and while it wasn’t expensive, it was worth about an hour’s work, given my pitiful rate of pay.

After my next passenger, not a long fare, I whipped back to the servo and asked the cashier if he still had my receipt. Turns out that this is not an uncommon request from forgetful cabbies, and he keeps all the leftover receipts in a box beside the till. I shouldn’t have been so anxious as I watched him riffle through the little squares of paper, but nobody likes working an hour for nothing.

And, as you can tell from the photograph at the top of the page, he found the receipt. So that was a minor victory.

And now, getting ready to drive my next shift, I wonder what car I’ll be in tonight, what bits will be missing, and what wealth I’ll find under the back seat.

The three questions

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 04:25:43 GMT

A Danish taxidriver once told me of the three questions he asks to himself of his night passengers.

Is he going to pay me?
Is he going to pull out a knife and attack me?
Is he going to throw up in my cab?

People tend to assume that these things happen to cabbies on a regular basis, and each shift is a nightmare ride, dodging the dark deeds of drunks, Robert de Niro cleaning bodily fluids from the back of his cab, lurid newspaper headlines.

But most passengers are very good. In eighteen months of driving, I’ve had two people throwing up in my cab, two deliberate fare evasions, and no violent incidents.

That changed last night.

It began with a typical pickup from the Alinga rank. A busy night and few cabs - taxidriver heaven. It also meant that I could pick my fares, avoiding high risk areas, people far gone drunk, people with hamburgers etc. Mind, at two in the morning, most of the work is ferrying home people too drunk to drive, so there’s a limit to the level of choice available.

My strategy on the main city rank after midnight is to engage the central locking and ignore all hails until I get to the head of the queue. The idea is to reward the passengers who are obeying the rules, rather than those who are more selfish, those who try to shortcut the system by flagging down cabs as they approach the line. I reckon that people who follow the rules are more likely to be considerate of the needs of a night cabbie, and less likely to score a “Yes” answer on the three questions.

Somewhere around two in the morning. Two girls and two guys. A typical group, and I couldn’t see any trouble out of them. I had my Abba video playing on the iPhone, and with any luck the girls would start singing along. For guys, I’ll put on Dire Straits, and it’s just amazing how good my passengers can be on the air guitar. Sitting down, not much room, seatbelt on, but still they become Mark Knopfler for a few happy minutes. I love it.

“Where are we going?” I asked. They named a suburb in Woden Valley and I swung the cab around. Most people would turn left onto Northbourne Avenue at the lights immediately in front, and then go through the lights at the London Circuit intersection, and the guy in the front seat yelped in surprise.

“We miss the lights, this way,” I explained as we moved slowly down East Row, random drunks crossing the street without looking. There’s a right turn onto London, and then we get a slip lane for the left turn to head south, so we can save a few minutes there. Most passengers appreciate it if we avoid red lights - and the meter ticking over while we wait for the green.

The two girls and guy in the back were chatting amongst themselves, but the bloke beside me wanted to engage the taxidriver.

“What’s your name, taxidriver?” he asked.

“TD,” I replied. Most people work it out after a few seconds, but this guy spent the rest of the ride trying out increasingly bizarre names with those initials. His suggestion of “Tiny Dick” was good, and I dutifully laughed, but I’d heard it before.

Something about his attitude was wrong. It was as if he was trying to prove something. He wanted to demonstrate his superiority over a taxidriver, I guess. Rather pointless. You get a young Asian driver on the nightshift, he could well be a doctor fresh off the plane, earning a modest crust while waiting for his paperwork to clear. An older guy might be an owner-operator worth a million dollars or two, given the value of taxi licences these days.

Then again, there’s my old day driver Leo, living in a government flat, looking after his elderly parents and forever short of a buck. A good shift and he can pay off some debt, a bad day and he’s scrabbling to find money to fill the tank. Frayed shirt and straggly beard, he’ll never make the A-list, but he has a heart and spirit that I love.

If some high school punk wants to sneer at a taxidriver to impress his girlfriend, that’s his business.

Me, I do this for fun. The money pays for holidays overseas, I chat with the passengers and I get to drive around a beautiful city. All the places I’ve seen, Canberra is still my favorite city in all the world. And I feel I’m doing something useful, getting people home. “Everyone’s entitled to a few drinks with their friends,” I tell my sozzled passengers, “and let’s face it, how else can you get home?”

The buses stop running after midnight, Canberra is far too spread out for all but a few to walk or cycle, and if all the drunks drove home, some of them wouldn’t make it. We cabbies might only be little cogs in the machinery of society, but in our own way we help keep things running smoothly.

I was directed into a pleasant suburban street. “Up there, where those shiny cars are parked.”

The girls got out and seemed to melt away into the wall. They had offered to pay, but the gentlemen had brushed away their money.

“Where now?”

I was directed a few streets away and down a cul-de-sac. With one eye on the GPS map, this looked fishy. Most people know the exact best way to get home, but I’d been directed around three sides of a square. Even slow drunken wits are usually sure on the turns and street names needed to tell a cabbie where to go.

I stopped the meter. “That’s twenty-seven eighty, thanks.”

The chap in the back seat got out, and the guy in front opened his door and stood up. Sometimes my stouter passengers do this so they can get their wallets out.

“You do credit?” he asked, and I got out the credit card terminal. Instead of handing me a card, he walked around to my side. I wound down the window. I was thoroughly suspicious by now, but the infra-red security camera above my door was taking in every detail. And of course, the interior cameras had recorded everything during the trip.

He and his mate were standing together by my door. “Bail!” the first guy shouted. “Sick!” his friend responded, and they were off, scuttling together across the parkland at the end of the street.

I’ll never chase a runner. I might catch them.

Besides, the time and trouble it would take, especially if the police got involved, would be a dead loss. Far better to get back on the road, finding fresh passengers and earning money, than to stuff about making statements in police stations.

I generally don’t worry too much if a passenger can’t pay. Sometimes they have spent all their cash and the bank card is declined. Sometimes they tell me, “Just drop me off when the meter hits ten dollars.”

If they are genuinely short, I don’t mind. I have to pay the owner half the cost of the fare, and a big chunk of what’s left over goes in tax, so it’s money straight out of my pocket, but then again, I generally score enough in tips from happy passengers to cover an act of charity.

I’m certainly not going to leave people stranded by the side of the road, so I’ll drive on past the ten dollars, just for the pleasure of seeing them home safely with a smile. Or I’ll wave away the apologies of an embarrassed passenger whose card has come back “Declined”.

“Just do something nice for someone else when you get a chance,” I tell them, and I’ll drive away, loaded down with good karma.

But I don’t like being taken advantage of. This looked like a practised act to my eyes, and doubtless a previous cabbie or two had been left fuming and cursing in that cul de sac while the young scoundrels ran off into the darkness where they knew every tree, every path, every laneway.

But they’d made a mistake tonight. Maybe they thought I wouldn’t remember where I’d dropped the girls off, but cabbies have a prodigious memory for places and streets and landmarks. I went back to the house with the shiny cars parked outside, wrote out a note and popped it into the letterbox. Pulled out my Day-Timer and made a record of the address and other details.

The next day, I played internet detective. It’s amazing what comes up with a bit of googling. I found a government database, checked a real-estate site, and looked at the phone book. I had a name and address, but on examining the online map, I began to wonder if I’d been quite so clever.

There was a laneway running down beside the house where the girls had been delivered. I wasn’t sure that I’d actually seen them go inside. Perhaps they had been in on the polished scam as well? Walked off down the lane, across the park, and into the flats. It would make sense to drop the girls off first if you were planning a runner. In tight skirts and high heels, they’d be a liability in a pursuit over parkland.

Maybe the residents of the house where I’d left my note were totally innocent. Maybe they were fed up with angry cabbies harassing them at all hours. Maybe I’d been outsmarted by a bunch of young ratbags.

But I didn’t think so. The girls had seemed genuine enough. Happy after a night out, they hadn’t really joined in baiting me during the ride. No sneers in their voices. And they’d offered to pay for their share of the trip.

One way to check. I rang the number and introduced myself as the cabbie who had left the note. The person who answered reassured me that yes, their daughter was one of the girls, they knew the boys, and I’d be paid.

So that was that. My score is now three runners in eighteen months.

No photograph for this entry. I could always put up a still from the security camera footage, I guess, but even thieves are entitled to privacy in today’s world.

I just hope this particular ratbag learns a lesson. Be nice to people who are nice to you. How hard is that?

http://skyring.com.au

The guy who rearended me...

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 02:11:01 GMT

Update: No, I didn’t really hope someone would crash into him. I’m sure he didn’t mean to run into me, just as I hadn’t meant to run into anyone the previous day. On re-examining the scene, I’m sure he made an honest attempt to get around my cab and if he’d been just that little bit further over he would have missed me completely. It was just one of those things. May he drive on, in safety and happiness. But boy, was I pissed off!

The owner, bless his heart, found me yet another cab to drive on Sunday night, and I had a good night. The city was buzzing, with nightclubs open, people having parties and generally enjoying the long weekend with the Queen’s Birthday holiday on the Monday. I might have been driving a veteran taxi, but I enjoyed the night, chatting with happy passengers and getting smiles on faces. And I didn’t break the taxi.

I guess I’ll stay a cabbie for a while longer!

Call it Karma

Sun, 08 Jun 2008 01:25:53 GMT

Bent
Originally uploaded by skyring

Friday afternoon I ran into another car. Saturday, another car ran into me.

I had one very minor prang fifteen years ago, but now I’m suddenly having accidents on a daily basis. It’s not fair.

The owner was good enough to find me another car while my silver limousine went in for treatment, and even arranged for me to drive a replacement shift to make up for the lost Friday earnings. A middle-aged taxi, amy temporary car had its share of minor faults, like the CD player not working, but ran sweetly enough, and put me in a fine humour for the night.

Steady work until three in the morning. I’d just come back from dropping off a couple in Belconnen. The wife was looking a bit queasy, and I’d given them the usual warning to let me know if we needed to pull over “and you’ll see just how fast a cabbie can stop!”

Luckily she held herself in for the drive home, and after the husband paid me, he went off to help his wife while she bent over some convenient rosebushes. That was nice. I don’t mind if people get drunk and throw up, so long as they don’t do it in my taxi.

I was in two minds about continuing on as I drove back into town. On the one hand, I’d worked a full twelve hours, and I was tired. But nothing a cup of coffee wouldn’t fix. I had the car for the whole weekend, with no day driver pacing up and down waiting to begin his shift. There was heaps of work around, with plaintive messages from base: “Seventy people waiting on Alinga Rank and no cars. Please assist!”

My chance to make a bit of extra money. Just as long as I had a caffeine boost to stretch me out until dawn, when the drunks stop flowing and the service stations become busy with unshaven cabbies gassing up, doing their paperwork and swapping night tales.

I had two choices for coffee at three in the morning. The 24 hour McDonalds on the corner of Mort and Cooyong, or the Braddon Caltex two blocks further on. I decided to swing past Maccas to see how busy it was before hitting the instant coffee at the Caltex.

I followed a cab around the corner into Mort Street, and for some unfathomable reason, he elected to discharge his passengers in the exit from the drive through lane, just past the corner. Heaven knows why, as there were two perfectly good vacant spaces a few metres on.

Anyway, he stopped, partially blocking my lane, and I slowed, in case his door sprang open and the passengers jumped out.

About a second later another car came around the corner and the driver discovered two taxis in his path. He hit me with a bang and I flung open my door and stormed out, about as angry as I’ve ever been in my life

It wasn’t so much the damage, which really amounted to no more than bent bumpers and damaged lights for both cars. Nor was it the fact that I’d have to end my shift early. It was the fact that in two successive shifts I’d managed to damage two different taxis.

This wasn’t the way things were supposed to happen. Not to me, at any rate.

There was a delicious irony somewhere, and I guess in years to come I might chuckle over it, but at that moment, I just wanted to rip the other bastard’s head off his shoulders and kick it across Lake Burley Griffin.

Luckily, I paused when I saw the damage, turned back to get my camera, and cooled down enough in those few seconds not to do anything stupid.

We moved our vehicles into the convenient car park slots, and exchanged details. He couldn’t stop apologising, doubtless keying off the expression on my face.

No real harm done, and it would all be sorted out later by insurance companies and repair shops.

But that was it for my shift. Maybe the workshop could get the car looking good in fifteen minutes, but I couldn’t bend the bumper back and pop the tail-light cluster back in. Even if I could get the car back into shape, I was in no state to deal with the increasingly ratty drunks I’d get before dawn.

The hardest part for me was telling the owner that I had broken another one of his cabs. I take a great deal of pride in keeping my taxi presentable, with the sparkling windows and the pristine doormats, and here I was returning his cars with dents and damage. I suggested that I take up a new career path as a pedestrian, but somehow he found enough faith in me to offer yet another car for a fresh shift.

If I believed in such a thing, I’d say that it’s karma, and somehow the books are balanced. I run into someone on Friday, on Saturday someone runs into me.

If this theory holds true, that means that the bloke who ran into me will be rear-ended tomorrow.

Oh, how I hope so!

Call me Brown

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 17:10:03 GMT

Bumper cracked
Originally uploaded by skyring

Some days you are Supercabbie, riding that golden slipstream through the taxi night, a succession of pleasant passengers lining up to give you a fifty dollar note and a warm smile.

And some days you are Muggins, puddling up Brownwater Creek, at a total loss, wondering why you signed on to drive cabs.

Call me Muggins tonight.

It started last night. I’d already lost a half hour out of my shift, grappling in a tight space under the bonnet to replace a blown headlight bulb. Dirt on my white shirt cuffs and minor cuts on my knuckles. And then after midnight, the main taxi rank was crowded with hungry cabbies but the usual crowd of university students in for their cheap drinks was way way down. I pulled out of the glacier line to answer a call to Dickson, a quick four minutes away down the backstreets, and that was only a ten dollar fare to Watson, two suburbs over.

Back to the main rank. One of the new drivers was at the head of the line, and he held up fingers to indicate his success as I passed him. Five fingers, meaning five hundred dollars. I glanced at my meter total, grimaced, and indicated to him with a “so-so” hand movement. I was over my target for the shift, but not by much.

Another driver stopped beside me for a chat. He was a lot further in front than I was, too. Oh well, maybe I’d get a big fare down to Gordon or Banks, shoot my meter up. You never know.

But when I eventually got to the head of the rank, my passengers were headed one suburb over, close beside the university. Six dollars and seventy-five cents, thank you very much.

And that was it for my night. I was in a foul mood by the time I got to the top of the rank again. I’d worked the last hour and a half for about eight dollars. Before tax.

I was dubious about going back onto the line anyway. But the main rank looked kind of empty when I glanced over on my way to the service station to gas up and go home. So I chucked a u-bolt to tail onto the line. Wouldn’t you know it. A dozen cabs appeared out of the darkness ahead of me while I waited for the lights to change. Again, it took a good half-hour to crawl up to the top of the rank. Finally I was at second position, keeping an eye on likely passengers, so I could release the door locks. Or not.

Here were a bunch of drunks getting into the cab ahead of me. One held a pizza box, freshly bought from one of the fast-food stands that line the footpaths outside the nightclubs, and he was handing out slices to his mates. Doubtless they’d drop bits of cheese and crumbs all over the floor mats and then wipe their greasy hands on the upholstery.

I pitied the poor cabbie. That’s one reason I keep my doors locked until I can check out late night passengers.

And here was a passenger for me. She wobbled down the street alone, her comfort for the night a bag of hot chips. Doubtless with gravy.

I spat the dummy then. Put the car in gear and rolled away empty. Some nights I don’t get paid enough to deal with the drunks.

So I gave myself an early mark and a good night’s sleep. Fresh and bright and early for this afternoon’s start, I signed on and immediately got a Silver Service booking in the same suburb. She was waiting for me when I arrived, I loaded her bags and tucked her in. We smiled and chatted as I joined the traffic heading for the airport.

It was my fault. Even though it wasn’t. I glanced away from the road for a moment, checking that I’d turned the meter on. Sometimes in the bustle of getting underway and listening to the passenger instructions I forget, so I’ll look down and confirm to myself that yes, I have turned the meter on.

And when I looked back to the road, my stream of traffic had come to a stop and my cushion of space was almost gone.

We worked it out later. Three cars ahead, a purple car had slowed without warning, and the black car following had braked hard, just missing. But the white car behind her, also braking suddenly, hadn’t been quite so lucky, and then I arrived with a hefty thump. I would have had a good twenty metres of full-on braking, the anti-skid kept the wheels from locking up, and none of us were going anywhere near the speed limit, but still, I was the last in the line, and so it was my fault, the whole domino lot of it.

The purple car whizzed off, untouched, numberplate unseen, and we all emerged to sort things out.

No injuries, thank goodness. But the radiator fluid hissing out onto the street told me that my shift was over. The other cars drove off into a nearby carpark, but I had to be pushed across the traffic, ending up, appropriately enough, in a disabled spot.

It was the towball on the car I hit that did me in. If it had been bumper to bumper, there would have been a few scratches, a few sharp words. But that towball went through my bumper and into the radiator. And straight into my wallet.

We sorted out a new cab to get my passenger to the airport. We all exchanged details. Photographs were taken. The owner arranged for a tow truck and came out to take a look at the damage.

“Go home and read books tonight,” he told me. “We’ll find another cab tomorrow.”

Probably some ancient old rattlebucket instead of my gleaming but dented limousine. Call me Muggins and colour me blue.

Hack in Canberra

Thu, 06 Sep 2007 02:20:21 GMT

Hack in Canberra
Originally uploaded by skyring

For as long as I've been driving taxis, I've been reading Melissa Plaut's blog of her life as a New York cabbie on the night shift.

And every time I read it, I give thanks that I'm driving in Canberra. Her traffic is thicker, her crazies are weirder, her interactions with other night people edgier. Me, the worst part of my job is dodging kangaroos on Hindmarsh Drive. Rush traffic is confined to a few slow-moving intersections and is clear in half an hour, the cops don't go too far out of their way to make taxidrivers miserable, and I don't have to wait in a smelly garage for a random cab every afternoon. It's cabbie heaven compared to Melissa's life.

Which is probably why I read her tales of angst and frustration with such glee. This is cabbie escapism, this is life on the brink, this is spice and raw emotion.

Melissa's first shift as a lesbian Jewish cabbie, someone stuck their hand into her window, formed it into the shape of a gun and said "Gimme all your money!" Great introduction to cabdriving!

Over the next few months she made her mistakes, found her feet, and became at one with the Western world's greatest city. She posted photographs and wrote up her adventures in a blog which rapidly became a classic.

And now it's a book. I was expecting an anthology of blog posts, really, maybe tidied and updated and commented, but no, this is a real, fresh book. Sure, some of her stories are recognisable, but they are rewritten into a coherent, consistent narrative.

There's a theme running through the book, a thread of life philosophy. She might not be laid back and buttoned down, but she's not selling out. She deals with the stress and aggression in her life and emerges all the stronger for it.

I took her book with me on my next shift, and in between passengers I read and rode along with her. When I got home, I read some more, and when I work up lat next morning, I finished the book off.

In many ways, Melissa and I are worlds apart, but in the world of cabdriving, we overlap. She talks of becoming a better driver, knowing the limits of car and traffic, opening up that mystical slipstream through the rush hour. Her nights are sprinkled with drunks and crazy people, cardboard coffee and seedy bathrooms.

And she has pride in her work, her life, her city. At three in the morning it's just the big city and the cabbies. Everyone else is asleep, the streets are hers and there's a feeling of satisfaction that ordinary people never know. She owns New York.

There's another tiny overlap. I spent twelve hours in New York on the Fourth of July, starting at midnight when I wished the immigration officer a ""Happy Birthday!", and ending at noon when my Tokyo flight left JFK.

In between I walked over the Brooklyn Bridge, mingled with the night people in Times Square, had an ethnic dinner at four in the morning, took the Staten Island ferry, waved at the Statue of Liberty, posed with the bronze bull on Wall Street, and sauntered through the cloisters of Columbia University. Maybe Melissa was driving a yellow cab that night, and maybe our paths crossed.

But here's the view from the other side of the plastic partition, the view of a native New Yorker, the view of a tough, spunky lady cabbie. Just reading the book is like strapping yourself into the passenger seat and getting observations on life and traffic jams delivered in a rich New York accent.

Spring Service

Tue, 04 Sep 2007 02:20:40 GMT

Silver Blossoms
Originally uploaded by skyring

It is within a grasshopper skip of spring here in Canberra, and once again I can enjoy that special, joyous, smug feeling that I find so irritating in my Northern Hemisphere friends. No longer will visitors from Darwin or Cairns gaze out at the willows and poplars on the drive in from the airport and ask, “why are there so many dead trees here?” Nor will I have to scrape the ice off my car windscreen when I return at three or four in the morning for the drive home to bed.

Two colourful heralds of spring have appeared along the roadside. The wattle is flowering, its fluffy golden flowers promising a glorious summer for the future, and a present for allergy sufferers. And here and there we see delicate pink clouds from cherry and plum trees.

It has been a year since I did my taxi course. Each lunchtime I would emerge into the crisp air and turn either right, towards the academic remainders bookshop, or left towards the sandwich shop. Sometimes both. And above me the cherry blossoms along Kembla Street lifted my heart with their fragile beauty. First as clusters of pink on the bare twigs, and then increasingly as a fairy carpet beneath.

That was a happy week, those five days of learning at the feet of experienced cabbies. My teachers were people who got a great deal of pleasure out of their job, and looked on it as more than an easy way to make a few bucks. Ever since then, I’ve enjoyed listening to the yarns old cabbies spring, and occasionally telling a few of my own.

Those cherry blossoms reminded me of my first visit to Japan, a few months earlier, when I was lucky enough to catch the April blooming in Osaka and Hiroshima. Such a land of contrasts to my Western eyes: the hideous urban ugliness of the great cities against the occasional beautiful parks, the sakura pink against the dark tree trunks, colour against the grey of the laneways.

Osaka’s recreated castle was a tall confection of pagoda gables in a park made up of ancient fortifications and monuments to fallen samurai. From the topmost lookouts I oversaw an island of greenery amongst the drab city, a peaceful retreat from the relentless hum and noise of industry and commerce.

We caught a taxi, my guide and I. I had no Japanese, and Carla, an English teacher from New York, not much more, but she knew Osaka and could point the cabbie in the right directions. I drew some comfort from the fact that here in this alien land the driver sat on the right side. But when I reached to buckle up my seatbelt, my hands skidded on emptiness.

“Seatbelts are optional here,” Carla smiled.

As an Australian cabbie, I’m required to ensure that my passengers are correctly strapped in, and with over a generation accustomed to “click-clack, front and back”, it’s a rare passenger I have to remind to “Buckle up please, not that it’s going to be a wild ride or anything, but it’s the law.”

In Japan the laws are different. Everything’s different. The cabbie had this weird lever arrangement so that he could open the passenger door without leaving his seat. Not sure about this. If a passenger is having trouble with the door, I like to bounce out and help them. I need every excuse to get a bit of exercise that comes my way.

There’s also the possibility that by hanging onto the lever, the cabbie can prevent a passenger from leaving the cab. Until they pay the fare, for instance. But once I got to know a bit about Japan, I couldn’t imagine a Japanese person ever “doing a runner”. On the list of Japanese national qualities, politeness and industriousness are at the top, and dishonesty doesn’t rate a mention.

In Canberra we only have one railway station, and it only has a couple of trains each day. Japan has the sort of railway system you’d get if you gave the train set nerds from your schooldays a bottomless bank account and an endless supply of Jolt Cola. Carla’s local railway station had a shopping mall built into the premises, and three levels of platforms, ranging from the underground on the bottom to the Shinkansen bullet trains whipping past at supersonic speeds on the roof.

“You think this is something?” Carla asked, seeing me gawping at the food hall, where dozens of tiny restaurants served the hurrying commuters. “You should see the main Osaka station at rush hour – it’s the railway station from Hell!”

We had tickets for the Shinkansen, and as I waited on the platform I reassured myself that I was here in real, waking life. Since my childhood, the image of these sleek superfast trains speeding past Mount Fuji had been an icon of Japan and the modern age. It was like preparing myself for a trip on the Concorde or the space shuttle, and I peered up the track, awaiting the marvel.

It did not disappoint. It was something out of science fiction, needle-nosed, a cab blistering out with two uniformed captains aloof behind the glass, and inside it was all neon and space. Carla generously gave me the window seat and then with a hum of power we were off, faster and faster along the smooth bullet-rails.

Osaka was soon past. Everything was soon past. Towns, villages, tunnels and bridges were gone in the blink of an eye. The only constants were the mountains in the middle distance, green forests on their steep flanks, and the silver rails beside us.

The train rocked sideways in the bow wave from a Shinkansen going the other way. Our combined velocities gave it a rocket speed. One moment it was there a scant metre beyond my nose, the next there was nothing but the clear air and the speeding green landscape.

A conductor worked his way down the aisle, checking tickets, each passenger getting the same set of deft motions as he examined the card, punched a hole, handed it back and gave a genteel little bow. I was charmed.

“The local trains are cheaper, but it takes a whole morning to get here,” Carla advised, as we drew up at Hiroshima’s station, a scant hour after leaving Osaka. Again, it had multiple levels of platforms and a shopping mall, and outside a quaint street tram waited to take us on. After the war, cities from all over Japan sent trams to Hiroshima, and to this day they trundle about in a glorious mixed memory of bygone days, a moving museum for rail fans, including two of the four Hiroshima streetcars that survived the attack.

I was awed by my first sight of the Peace Dome, the empty girders and ruined stonework a reminder of the city destroyed by the atomic bomb. A tumbled ruin, it was one of the few buildings remaining upright after the explosion scoured away flimsier structures and set the wreckage burning. Now it is a shrine, and we tourists, we pilgrims linger in front, talking in low tones and never smiling.

There was more to see. Across the Ota river were more memorials and shrines. A statue of a young girl recalls Sadako Sasaki, who died of leukemia years after the war. She spent her final days folding paper cranes, hoping that when she finished a thousand she would begin to recover. She made six hundred before she died. Her schoolmates contributed the balance, and to this day children from around the world send folded paper cranes in her memory. They are housed in displays around the memorial, millions of multicoloured paper birds, spelling out messages of peace.

A rest house surviving the bomb now offers refreshments and souvenirs. The donated cranes are recycled into notebooks and bookmarks after being displaced by fresh donations, and I bought a few bookmarks, marvelling at the rich texture of the recycled origami paper, full of coloured fragments from around the world, held together by love.

A huge Japanese bell hangs in an elegant little shrine, and visitors are encouraged to ring the bell for peace. Every few minutes the deep note of the bell sounds out over the park, and another wish goes with it.

“Look!” Carla nudged me. A group of tourists were walking through the park, escorted by a man in uniform. “It’s a taxidriver tour. The tourists hire the cab and are shown around by the driver. It costs a huge amount of money.”

We found ourselves on the river bank again. Hiroshima is built on a river delta and there are seven river mouths, each channel defining another island. Here was an arcade of cherry trees, their fresh blossoms forming another river of pink. Beneath the trees were groups of businessmen, sitting on picnic blankets, drinking saki and eating rice snacks. “See how they hold out their glasses,” my guide pointed, “If a blossom falls in their drink, it is good luck. They call it hanami, and they send out the office juniors before work hours to mark out the best spots so they can have their lunch under the trees.”

In the river a pink boat cruised by, tourists lining the deck and a hidden generator sending out clouds of pink bubbles, which floated surreally overhead. A camera crew moved through the merry businessmen, gathering footage of the celebration. An atomic bomb survivor, an old lady now, stood on a bridge silently holding a placard.

They are serious about their message of peace here. The whole of the atomic bomb museum is one long sermon on the evils of atomic war, and I am cynic enough to find the message a trifle cloying. Yet after seeing the sad fragments of the destroyed lives, a sandal here, a lunchbox there, a shadow of a vaporised woman burnt into the stone steps where she had been sitting, and reading the story of the party of schoolchildren who had been clearing a firebreak under the bomb’s detonation point, I began to understand.

It was with sorrow in my heart that I turned from the last display and walked along a gallery, the view of the memorial park under low clouds, the ruined dome at the far end of a tended vista, the open space made up from the never-finished firebreak. I didn’t cry, but I was close. A soft rain began to fall, and I wrote my name in the visitors book, adding a note in French, il pleut.

Carla led me back under the cherry blossoms, past drunken businessmen widdling in the bushes, to the streetcar stop, and we returned to the station, wandering down the candy aisles of a department store, purchasing peculiarly Japanese sweets in odd flavours and packaging for my children at home in a land untouched by war.

I stared out the window on the way back, appreciating the fleeting beauty, my feelings at one with the grey clouds. That night, in the cramped apartment Carla shared with two flatmates, I made a long entry in my travel journal, ending with two words in upper case, underlined and bold.

NEVER AGAIN

Oh yes, they call him The Sheik

Mon, 27 Aug 2007 11:43:05 GMT

We’ve been having trouble with the battery in the cab. As with all cabs, merely turning off the ignition doesn’t necessarily turn off all the equipment, and there are a tonne of add-ons that drain power. The radio, security cameras, despatch/GPS screen, EFTPOS machine, printer...

Actually, it’s been Jamie, the day driver, who has been having problems. If I drop the car off at three in the morning and he doesn’t start driving until five or so, then that two hour gap has been enough to drop the battery down to critical levels. Add in the fact that he’s recently been crook with the flu and just getting out of bed has been a struggle some days, and let’s just say that the jumper leads have been getting a work out.

After the car needed a jump start the other day, Jamie ran me through the steps to take in order to disconnect all the additional equipment. We’ve got kill switches for the main computer and the credit card machine, but the security cameras and other stuff need me to rummage around under the hood and pull out plugs. Not always easy to find at three on a cold winter morning, but I hold my torch in my teeth and do the job.

Even then that sometimes isn’t enough. Jamie got up to start work one day, looked in the secret place where we hide the keys, and found they weren’t there. This has always been a fear of mine, that I’d lock the cab, automatically slip the keys into my pocket, and drive off home, to be awakened in due course by the day driver fuming from the other side of the city.

Naturally, he blamed me for the keys not being in the right place, and he was right, but at least I hadn’t driven home with them. Instead he found them still in the ignition.

Ooops. At the end of a long shift, I’m tired and prone to make mistakes. Evidently the extra effort of checking under the hood to pull out the power plugs for the cameras had been enough to make me forgetful about the keys.

Douple oops. Just leaving the key in the ignition had meant that a few small light bulbs had remained lit, draining power from our precarious battery, and once again Jamie had to use his own car to jump start the cab.

What we really need is a better battery. “I’ll duck around to the workshop when I get a chance,” Jamie promised.

The workshop, which is also the office, hasn’t been its normal self recently. There have been emotional crises and separations, leading to a change at the top. The owner/manager, a superb leader and organiser, has taken himself elsewhere, leaving the fleet in the hands of his father-in-law, Hassim.

Hassim is a Canberra cabbie of long standing, and all the old drivers recall him with affection from the days before uniforms were mandatory, and he drove in traditional dress, complete to a long white gown and a little round cap topping off a bearded face. They called him “The Sheik”.

He still gets around in this rig, apparently, even if he no longer drives a shift, but I haven’t been into the workshop for a while. It’s usually the day driver who gets lumbered with all the service tasks, mostly because the night shifts operate outside business hours when all the mechanics have gone home and get some sleep.

Sleep management is one of my major concerns these days. If I’m tired, I make mistakes, and there are only so many mistakes you can get away with when you are driving a night cab in an environment rich with drunk people and kangaroos.

If I find myself growing tired, I don’t wait for the microsleeps to start, or rely on the passenger to keep me awake. “When I die,” I tell the bloke beside me in the front seat, “I want to go like my grandfather, gently and peacefully in my sleep, and not screaming in terror like his passengers.”

That usually keeps both of us wide awake.

But if I get tired, I either end the shift early and go home, or I find a dark spot, park the car, crank the seat back and zonk off for a while. Even a fifteen minute power nap is enough to keep me going for the rest of the shift.

As it happens, Canberra is well provided with little bits of darkness. There are parks and recreation areas in even the most built-up suburbs, and in between the town centres there are belts of bushland. The driveway up to the Yarralumla Woolshed is a good spot, as is the lane leading to the horse paddocks off Athlon Drive. I have my favourite spots, away from street lights and out of the glare of oncoming traffic.

Last Friday night, about midnight, I took a passenger all the way out to Jerrabomberra, over the border, south of Queanbeyan. A bit out of my regular track. Feeling a teensy bit tired towards the end of my driving week, and decided to pull over for a kip somewhere before getting stuck into the Saturday morning wheel home the ratty drunks routine.

Queanbeyan isn’t quite the garden city that Canberra is, and every time I found a patch of green parkland on the map, I’d find that it was too public, or too well provided with streetlamps for ease of sleeping. I don’t want people walking past the cab chatting while I’m trying to sleep with a neon glare on my face.

Eventually I looked into the Queanbeyan racetrack. They have a carpark which is just fantastic. Long and skinny, I drove in about five hundred metres, found a nice big tree to shield me from a distant lamppost, reclined the seat way back, took off my shoes, hit the central locking and zonked off.

Well, it had been a long week, and although I woke after half an hour, the lure of further sleep overcame my interest in getting more drunks home from nightclubs, and I rolled over and kipped out again.

It was somewhere within a tick-tock of one in the morning when I finally roused myself enough to get back on the road. I put my shoes back on, groped around for my glasses, sat up and turned the key. Nothing. I tried again, the engine fired and died immediately. No matter what I did after that, it wouldn’t start. Odd, because as far as I could tell, I still had a healthy charge in the battery. The headlights worked, the computer booted up, the radio worked when I rang base and told them I was broken down...

And vastly interested base was, once I told them I didn’t have any passengers in the car.

I figured that the car must be broken in some way, and I was in a right fix. I was several hundred metres away from the nearest street, it was the middle of the night, I didn’t have the phone number of the new manager, and the lead driver of our Silver Service fleet wasn’t answering on our phone. I left a message on the mechanic’s phone, but that wasn’t going to help me. Not for several hours, if he was working on the weekend, anyway.

I got out my torch and peered under the hood. There didn’t seem to be anything wrong, though I must admit that if there was, I probably couldn’t pick it anyway, modern engines being what they are, with a tonne of taxi electrics piled on top of the LPG conversion.

I knew that base could direct another taxi to me with jumper leads, but I was pretty sure that it wasn’t a flat battery. My options were dwindling. On the one hand, I didn’t want to leave the taxi in a remote location, but on the other hand, there didn’t seem to be anything further I could do, and the longer I stayed, the colder it was going to get, and whatever was left in the battery would disappear and make my situation even more desperate.

If there had been a moon, I would have gone out and howled at it, but instead I rang up base on the radio and asked them to contact our lead driver, who could at least retrieve me, leaving the cab to be picked up by the mechanic in due course.

They passed on my message, and in a few minutes my phone chirped. “Yeah,” said Gordon, the head driver, “I can be there in ten, fifteen minutes.”

And he was. I saw his lights approaching, got out and waved my torch at him as the headlights swept over the car. And disappeared.

I felt like a marooned survivor on a desert island frantically signalling to the diminishing search planes. I flashed my torch, jumped up and down, and hoped that he would spot me in his rear view mirror.

Blast. A final flash of tail lights and he was gone, leaving me alone with a broken down cab in the best, darkest, most private midnight napping place I’d ever found.

But of course, this is the day of the mobile phone, and I rang through the darkness to a puzzled Gordon, asking him to try again, just a little bit further this time.

And he did, sweeping up in a blaze of electric light, parking nose to nose, “We’ll just try the old jump start, see what happens, eh?”

We ran the leads over, I turned the key, and feeling like the happiest idiot in the world, my cab fired up. I approached Gordon as he coiled up his jumper leads, offering him a twenty.

“No need for that,” he said. “But you can buy me a coffee in the Shell servo on Tharwa Road.”

I followed him to the service station, and while the cab idled outside, we took our comfort in machine coffee and an elderly doughnut.

“Funny thing happened the other week,” Gordon mused. “I was at the airport, sitting there minding my own business, watching the security guys up ahead giving the cabbies a hard time. It was just after the bombing at Glasgow Airport, and everyone was a bit on their toes, but what it boiled down to was that you got hassled if you parked a bit too close to the zebra crossing.

“Anyway, there I was, waiting for my turn to go through the boom gate and onto the rank when someone opens the back door and slings in a bag. Big bag, it was. I looked out and there’s this guy in Islamic clothes, full beard, funny little hat, the whole bit. I near wet myself. He opens the front door, sits down beside me, takes one look at my face and bursts out laughing.

“He’d just come in from Sydney, and figured that he wasn’t going to pay money to a stranger when there was one of his own Silver Service cabs available.”

“Ah!” I said, “It was Hassim!”

“Yeah,” Gordon said, draining his cardboard cup, “Nice bloke.”

We got back in our cabs and drove off in different directions, Gordon down to Tuggeranong to end his shift, me back into Civic to pick up a few nightclubbers and try to make a few dollars to salvage the night.

No, not the one in Texas, Sheesh!

Sun, 05 Aug 2007 04:28:08 GMT

Trust me on this. It's a blog from some smartarse taxi despatcher in Arlington (yeah, not Arlington Massachusetts, the other one) who posts transcriptions of phone calls from customers. It lives here.

Be warned, my wife has been listening to me howling and clutching me ribs and falling out of my chair for about an hour now, so you might want to either share the screen with your partner or do this alone.

Awaiting the Book

Mon, 23 Jul 2007 06:34:27 GMT

I put in a pre-order for the book today. I've been waiting for it for months now, with the author dropping tantalising hints about its pre-publication progress and hints as to the contents. She's finally finished it and it will be released next month. I can't wait!

The author is, of course, Melissa Plaut, who writes the New York Hack blog, and has recounted some of her best adventures, her personal philosophy, and her insight into the human race in general and New Yorkers in particular in her book "Hack", which is being released on 28 August.

I started reading Melissa's blog about a year ago, and I enjoyed her descriptions of taxidriving. It's more than a job, I realised, and if a skinny young lady could make a go of driving a Yellow Cab around New York at night, then surely I could handle Canberra. And have a lot of fun doing it.

There are a tonne of cabbie blogs around, I quickly discovered, and I've been following one or two of them. Perhaps the one closest to my heart is Adrian Neylan's Sydney Cablog, in which he dispenses a daily dose of cabbie highlights and wisdom. Heaven knows how he does it; towards the end of my working week I have no time to do anything much beyond drive and sleep.

RingBear and the Deathly Hallows

Sun, 22 Jul 2007 10:29:07 GMT

RingBear and the Deathly Hallows
Originally uploaded by skyring

Harry Potter Day!

I got sucked into the Hogwarts phenomenom about four books back when I wanted to find out what the readerverse was so excited about and why the rest of the family battled over each new book.

I had a bit of catching up to do, but I was quickly up to speed on Muggles and Dumbledores and all the other magical creatures of Harry's world. Since then, I've been as keen as anyone else to read the next book in the series, or watch the latest movie.

Fast forward to book six. My daughter works as a babysitter and was explaining to the parent that she had been up all night reading the latest book.

"Harry Potter! Aren't you a bit old for that?"

"Oh, I don't know," she replied. "I had to fight both my parents for reading time."

Not great literature, to be sure, but JK Rowling knows how to tell a story. Along with just about everyone else, I want to know what happens next.

So today was the launch of the seventh and final book in the series. My daughter went out and bought a copy, hot off the barrow, lining up with dozens of folk dressed as wizards and witches. That was the last we saw of her for a while.

With wife and two kids all reading the same copy, one picking it up as soon as another laid it down, I figured that my chances of snaffling it for a twelve-hour shift were pretty close to zero. I also anticipated a quiet night, with a large chunk of the regular Saturday night partygoers and nightclubbers tucked up at home reading Harry Potter.

And the last thing I wanted was to get back to work on Tuesday and have groups of passengers discussing the plot and destroying all the surprises.

So my first action on Saturday after signing on was to find a park across from a bookshop, dash into the shop, lay down my money before a sales assistant in long black hat and spiders, seize a copy of Harry Potter and dash back to my cab, chortling happily.

Just time for a picture of RingBear and I was off, to find a comfortable slowmoving taxi rank and get stuck into reading.

From that point on for the rest of my shift I was flat out. So much for my prediction of a quiet night. Half of Canberra was out having a few drinks. I'd drop off a passenger and immediately get another radio booking. I'd pull up on a rank and a dozen people would appear out of nowhere.

I managed a page or two here and there but by the time I unloaded the last drunk at dawn, I was barely into the second chapter.

I snuck in another page while running the car through the car wash, then I went back to the day driver's home, signed off, and drove my own car home, ready for my two days off.

"Oh goodie!" exclaimed my son, as I wearily dropped my money bag, coin holder and Harry Potter onto the kitchen table. "Another book! Thanks, Dad!"

And that was the last I saw of him and Harry.

Die Taxidrivers!

Wed, 11 Jul 2007 03:08:40 GMT

Here is a taxi rank, late at night. A line of cabs is drawn up, engines idling, drivers likewise.

Peep inside. One taxidriver is fiddling with the CD player. Another has the light on and is reading a book, his finger moving along the page, his mouth silently following along. This one is gesticulating, stabbing the air as if to make a point. Avoid him. Here's a driver apparently talking to someone unseen, carrying on a conversation in a foreign tongue, faint and alien sounds percolating through the glass. Another is concentrating on a sheaf of papers, brow furrowed in concentration. The driver at the front of the rank should be ready to leap into action with the arrival of a passenger, but he's obviously far away in thought, perhaps dreaming of a holiday in some warmer part of space and time than midnight in winter Canberra, where the outside temperature has a minus sign in front of it.

Oh wait, they are all me.

I have a six-stacker CD player in my cab, and I've replaced the Grateful Dead album with a teach-yourself-a-foreign-language course-in-a-box. There's nine CDs ranging from "Useful Phrases" to "Total Immersion", and I'm at the "Hello, my name is Peter, where is my luggage?" stage of beginnertalk on Disk One.

My days of formal education are long gone. We had a choice of French or German in high school, and I chose French, which mostly vanished as soon as I graduated, apart from a few phrases which did little more than show willing when I visited Paris and Normandy decades later. There was a year of Italian at university, which went on for six months longer than it should have, but will doubtless give me a running start should I ever get an audience with the Pope, and he's keen to discuss the weather.

Back in my schooldays, the prospect of actually using any of those languages for more than the chance to spend time in the same room with the big-bosomed French teacher was remote indeed, but I'm now wishing I'd paid a bit more attention to the formal curriculum and a bit less to the strain on her top button, because it would probably come in mighty handy to be able to discuss the longstanding shortcomings of the Paris underground with someone who could route me from Charles de Gaulle to Place de la Bastille in an efficient way that didn't involve hauling my bags up the longest staircases in Europe.

"Bonjaw, Messewer," I say to a chap in a uniform, and he shrugs at anything beyond that point.

And now, with the Frankenstein Place youth hostel in Frankfurt a regular and comfortable stop on my travels, I'm trying to get a handle on German, if only to understand all those "alter fahrt" comments being passed behind my back.

German is pronounced more vigorously than English, the phrasebook informs me, and I couldn't agree more. Every phrase delivered by the speakers sounds like a combination curse, sneeze, throat-clearing and torrent of abuse, and merely stringing together the words for "I am in Frankfurt, my luggage is in Hamburg, I am suddenly hungry." would get you ejected from all but the seediest nightclubs in Canberra.

But I'm learning and persevering, and working out how the language is pieced together. I might not be able to understand all the words in "99 Luftballons" just yet, but I'm getting there.

Last night's lesson involved numbers, and although I can understand that 55 is "Funfundfunfzig", I am a long way from being able to pronounce it without either laughing or sneezing. That final syllable defeats me utterly. It might look easy, but there's enough action going on in the back of the throat and sinus cavities to turn those three little letters into a performance worthy of either the Oscars or the Olympics. At the moment I'm several laps away from the winner's podium, but I'm getting a taste for drama. "Funfundfunfzig", I snort into the rear view mirror, my face contorting in simulated rage to help the syllables escape in suitably Teutonic fashion.

"Gesundheit!" says a cheerful young lady, dropping into the passenger seat beside me.

Sparks Flying

Tue, 12 Jun 2007 03:57:34 GMT

There are two ways to get to the Australian Defence Force Academy from the main Canberra City rank. The first is to go down London Circuit, turn left onto Constitution Avenue, follow that all the way to Defence Force HQ on Russell Hill, and then take Northcott Avenue over the hill, putting on the high beams to pick out kangaroos through the bushy bits. The second is to go up Ainslie Avenue, turn right along Limestone past the War Memorial, and take Fairbairn Avenue towards the airport round the back of Campbell, again watching out for Skippy as you go.

I’ve tried both ways, and they work out to exactly the same distance and the same number of traffic lights. If the passengers express a preference, that’s the way we go, but otherwise, I take whichever way feels best at the time. The cadets know that the fare will be fifteen dollars either way, and they usually organise themselves into parties of three or four to share a cab.

It works the same way in reverse, going from the academy or the nearby Royal Military College into Civic, where the nightclubs are, and a cabbie can make a few dollars ferrying cadets into town in the dusk, and dropping them back to their barracks around midnight. They are good passengers, because the military cadets aren’t going to misbehave or do a runner at the far end.

The downside is that often they organise themselves into groups while waiting at the Academy rank for separate cabs called previously. The first cab to show up gets the fare, any other cabs miss out. I can’t blame the cadets for teamwork and making the best use of available resources, but it’s a bit of a pain to drive all the way out there on a radio booking and find no passengers waiting.

These jobs aren’t my preference, but if it’s a slow night, I figure that a fare’s a fare, and if I luck out, all I have to do is wait a while and a bunch of other cadets will wander up wanting a ride into town. And because I’ll be booked into the zone, that’ll be my job.

I saw a cover job at the Academy on Saturday arvo, and as I was in the area looking for work, I accepted the job. There were three cadets waiting for me at the rank, and they continued their conversation as they climbed in.

“I was driving past the War Memorial,” one said “and there was this kid hiding behind a parked car. He shot off a rocket at me as I went past. Jeez, but I nearly pissed myself!”

We came up to the academy gates, and I turned left. “We’re going the other way,” I announced.

It’s the Queen’s Birthday long weekend here in Canberra. It’s not the Queen’s actual birthday, which is 21 April, not the second Monday in June. But for some reason, we celebrate the day in early winter, and for most people it’s pretty much the last public holiday before Christmas, so there is always a flurry of activity, with public servants heading off on Friday for a long weekend away interstate.

Those of us who are left can either love or loathe the fireworks. In every State in Australia, fireworks are banned, except for displays set up and run by professionals. Here, any adult can go to a shop, buy as many fireworks as their wallet allows, and set them off all weekend. While the impromptu displays are colourful and exciting, the sound of a series of nearby explosions at four in the morning as some hoodlum lights up a load can try the patience a bit.

Perhaps closer to home is the effect on pets. My wife’s little terrier dog shivers in fear all weekend, and this morning’s paper brings a flood of lost animal reports, including at least two run over by cars.

On the whole, I can’t say I approve. The noise, the litter, the danger, and the misuse outweighs any pleasure. I’ll happily go out and watch one of the big official displays, where the time and place is advertised, the actual fireworks are set off well away from the onlookers, and all appropriate safety regulations are observed. But when it comes to putting fireworks in the hands of the public, there are always going to be a few yahoos, blowing up mailboxes and firing rockets off at passing cars.

The actual holiday brings with it a list in the morning paper of those who have been honoured with a decoration in the Order of Australia. Established thirty odd years ago, these honours replace the old British knighthoods, British Empire Medals and so on. I think it’s a lot more fun to call someone Sir Fred Nerk, but there it is.

I doubt anyone’s ever going to nominate me for “services to taxidriving”, but still, I look through the list in a faint hope. Dashed.