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Four months
Feb. 14th, 2007 01:36 pmIt's been four months (almost) since I commenced my first shift as a taxi driver. Guess what? I still love it!
I get a burst of pride when I look at Taxi 165. It's sparkling clean, inside and out, it runs like a champion, it smells fresh, and I'm happy to be the night driver for such a handsome vehicle. Every afternoon I pull into the day driver's place to take it out, and when I see the car standing ready for me, I get a happy glow at the pleasures of the night ahead.
Canberra is a delightful city in which to be a taxi driver. There's very little in the way of congestion, the roads are clear and wide, the suburbs are distinct entities, the street names are (almost) unique, and the people are well-behaved folk. It's pretty close to being cabbie paradise in my opinion.
The money's good. I've just bought a new car, the first time in my life I've owned a vehicle fresh off the showroom floor, and I'm saving my pennies for international trips later on. In fact I'm off for an overseas vacation this weekend, paid for by taxidriving.
Just a quick weekend over in New Zealand for a BookCrossing convention. I'll meet some old friends, make some new ones, and have a wonderful time in a magic land. I love New Zealand, ever since spending my honeymoon there. I've been back four times since and a couple of years ago I published a book about it.
Much as I love cabbing, I love travel even more, and although I'll miss out on a couple of big-earning shifts, I have to remind myself of where my priorities lie. I work to live, not the other way around.
BookCrossing, I hear you ask? Oh yeah. Let me explain.
For the past four years, I've been a BookCrosser. It's this crazy American idea, one of the fruits of the Internet. Basically, you take a book, register it on the www.BookCrossing.com website, write down a registration number inside the book and set it free. Simple as that.
The idea is that someone finds the book, reads a little screed pasted inside, goes to the site, enters the registration number and writes a short "journal entry" about how they found it and what they thought of the book, before setting it free once more. In fact, the Oxford English Dictionary defines it as "the practice of leaving a book in a public place to be picked up and read by others, who then do likewise."
If you find one of these books, you can look it up and see where it has travelled. Some of these books have been around the world, bouncing from park bench to coffee shop to youth hostel in a random series of encounters. I've released books in all of these places, and many more. On the top of a mountain, under the snout of a glacier, over Niagara Falls. The mountaintop book was found and journalled within a few hours, the other two are yet to report back.
All in all, I've registered and released about 1500 books. According to the site, about half of those have been found by other people. At this point I should note that a lot of these found books were caught by other BookCrossers, though I'd estimate that at least a hundred have been found by newcomers.
You see, it's not so much the books that excite me as the other BookCrossers. Never have I found such a wonderful group of people. To a man (or rather, woman, as most BookCrossers are female) they are well-read, generous, fun-loving people. Above all, they have a spark of quirkiness, a personality that takes pleasure in the thought of leaving a book in a strange place for someone else to find.
The BookCrossing site has a series of forums, and once I had overcome my initial shyness, I found that I had a ready-made online community of friends. I quickly made contact with other Australian BookCrossers, and by 2003 we had a group meeting regularly in Canberra, swapping books at a local coffee shop.
In 2004, international conventions were held in Christchurch and St Louis, followed up by an Australian convention in Sydney towards the end of the year. I attended, and I was hooked. I met a great number of BookCrossers, we virtually paved Sydney with books, including a flashmob at the Opera House, and I had an amazing good time. Since then I've attended as many conventions as I can afford, travelling around the world three and a half times to meet BookCrossers in Europe, the UK, North America and Japan, as well as New Zealand. My books have been everywhere, and not a week passes without I hear from one of them, continuing its travels.
But again, it's not the books, it's the people, and I have made some wonderful friends. Other people have hobbies such as restoring vintage cars or flying ultralight aircraft. For me, it's meeting BookCrossers.
I've mentioned this to a few of my passengers, and occasionally, I have a book to give them. My friends tell me that I should leave books for people to find in the back of the cab, but I think that's a bit contrived.
My one regret is that I have so little spare time nowadays. Most days, if I'm not driving, I'm sleeping. This gives me very little spare time to keep in contact with my friends, though this makes the moments when I meet them in the flesh even more precious.
And, of course, I do my best to keep on writing about my taxi-driving adventures. This is an interesting time to be a cabbie in Canberra, and over the next few months I'll be following events.
I get a burst of pride when I look at Taxi 165. It's sparkling clean, inside and out, it runs like a champion, it smells fresh, and I'm happy to be the night driver for such a handsome vehicle. Every afternoon I pull into the day driver's place to take it out, and when I see the car standing ready for me, I get a happy glow at the pleasures of the night ahead.
Canberra is a delightful city in which to be a taxi driver. There's very little in the way of congestion, the roads are clear and wide, the suburbs are distinct entities, the street names are (almost) unique, and the people are well-behaved folk. It's pretty close to being cabbie paradise in my opinion.
The money's good. I've just bought a new car, the first time in my life I've owned a vehicle fresh off the showroom floor, and I'm saving my pennies for international trips later on. In fact I'm off for an overseas vacation this weekend, paid for by taxidriving.
Just a quick weekend over in New Zealand for a BookCrossing convention. I'll meet some old friends, make some new ones, and have a wonderful time in a magic land. I love New Zealand, ever since spending my honeymoon there. I've been back four times since and a couple of years ago I published a book about it.
Much as I love cabbing, I love travel even more, and although I'll miss out on a couple of big-earning shifts, I have to remind myself of where my priorities lie. I work to live, not the other way around.
BookCrossing, I hear you ask? Oh yeah. Let me explain.
For the past four years, I've been a BookCrosser. It's this crazy American idea, one of the fruits of the Internet. Basically, you take a book, register it on the www.BookCrossing.com website, write down a registration number inside the book and set it free. Simple as that.
The idea is that someone finds the book, reads a little screed pasted inside, goes to the site, enters the registration number and writes a short "journal entry" about how they found it and what they thought of the book, before setting it free once more. In fact, the Oxford English Dictionary defines it as "the practice of leaving a book in a public place to be picked up and read by others, who then do likewise."
If you find one of these books, you can look it up and see where it has travelled. Some of these books have been around the world, bouncing from park bench to coffee shop to youth hostel in a random series of encounters. I've released books in all of these places, and many more. On the top of a mountain, under the snout of a glacier, over Niagara Falls. The mountaintop book was found and journalled within a few hours, the other two are yet to report back.
All in all, I've registered and released about 1500 books. According to the site, about half of those have been found by other people. At this point I should note that a lot of these found books were caught by other BookCrossers, though I'd estimate that at least a hundred have been found by newcomers.
You see, it's not so much the books that excite me as the other BookCrossers. Never have I found such a wonderful group of people. To a man (or rather, woman, as most BookCrossers are female) they are well-read, generous, fun-loving people. Above all, they have a spark of quirkiness, a personality that takes pleasure in the thought of leaving a book in a strange place for someone else to find.
The BookCrossing site has a series of forums, and once I had overcome my initial shyness, I found that I had a ready-made online community of friends. I quickly made contact with other Australian BookCrossers, and by 2003 we had a group meeting regularly in Canberra, swapping books at a local coffee shop.
In 2004, international conventions were held in Christchurch and St Louis, followed up by an Australian convention in Sydney towards the end of the year. I attended, and I was hooked. I met a great number of BookCrossers, we virtually paved Sydney with books, including a flashmob at the Opera House, and I had an amazing good time. Since then I've attended as many conventions as I can afford, travelling around the world three and a half times to meet BookCrossers in Europe, the UK, North America and Japan, as well as New Zealand. My books have been everywhere, and not a week passes without I hear from one of them, continuing its travels.
But again, it's not the books, it's the people, and I have made some wonderful friends. Other people have hobbies such as restoring vintage cars or flying ultralight aircraft. For me, it's meeting BookCrossers.
I've mentioned this to a few of my passengers, and occasionally, I have a book to give them. My friends tell me that I should leave books for people to find in the back of the cab, but I think that's a bit contrived.
My one regret is that I have so little spare time nowadays. Most days, if I'm not driving, I'm sleeping. This gives me very little spare time to keep in contact with my friends, though this makes the moments when I meet them in the flesh even more precious.
And, of course, I do my best to keep on writing about my taxi-driving adventures. This is an interesting time to be a cabbie in Canberra, and over the next few months I'll be following events.
