Strike a light

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.

Sand in my cab

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...