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Pure genius
Jun. 16th, 2008 03:37 pmThe 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 Familia 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.
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 Familia 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.
