Three Smiles

I picked up a lady on the airport rank this evening. Smartly dressed, small carryon bag. She got into the back seat and said “High Court”.

Not the usual destination for an airport passenger in the early evening, so I guessed that she was a lawyer or senior staff, possibly delivering or collecting some important papers.

I headed out over the jumble of construction barriers and uneven pavement that marks the airport road system nowadays, glanced out at the main road, and swung round to go the back way along Nomad Road. It’s got a 40 km/h limit on it, and a trio of speed bumps to keep cabbies honest, but when the main road is choked at peak hours, it’s the way to go.

“Has it changed this much?” my passenger asked. “I don’t remember going along here before.”

I explained that no, the roadworks hadn’t turned this road into the main exit, just that it was a good way to bypass the congestion, and I gestured over at the main road a few metres away, where the cars were crawling along.

And that got us started on the subject of roadworks and how Canberra does a poor job of implementing and upgrading roads. I rattled on, a subject close to my heart, and she murmured in agreement now and then.

Had a grand old natter, the two of us, and as we pulled into the High Court, we talked about the new National Portrait Gallery, just opened next door. I nodded over at the new entrance, commenting that it didn’t feel right to drive across the High Court’s grand entrance ramp, just in front of the fountain. “It’s not fitting,” I said, and it isn’t.

We pulled up at the practitioner’s entrance, and she paid with a card. I glanced at the name on it, and my jaw dropped a little. I handed her a receipt, and made my usual joke, “I’ll just drive off with your baggage now.”

She smiled, and I leapt out, popped the boot up, hauled out her bag, extended the handle and opened her door in one fluid motion.

“Thank you very much,” she twinkled, “You’re a doll.”

And that made my day. Not every shift that a High Court Justice calls this cabbie a doll.

Next job from the airport was at the other end of the market. A young Asian lady, carrying two cloth bags, asking how much the fare to the city was. I picked her for a student.

“Oh, fifteen, twenty dollars,” I replied.

I packed her bags into the boot and she got into the front seat. I asked her for a destination, but she was a bit uncertain, asking if there were any backpackers hostels in town.

“Just one,” I said, “the YHA in the city centre.”

Had a quartet of cheery Christians from the hostel the previous day. They’d rated it highly. I’m a big consumer of hostels in my travels, though naturally I haven’t staid at the Canberra YHA, and I always find YHA or HI establishments very well kept, so I had no hesitation in recommending this one to her. Cheap and cheerful, excellent value, clean, tidy, comfortable and safe.

We made our way into the city centre. She’d been here before, and noted some landmarks as we got closer. I took the back way down the lane into Akuna Street, driving underneath an office building, and her eyes widened in alarm, but a few seconds later we were back in the open air, the hostel in front of us.

The meter read $17.60, but I stuck by my low estimate. “That’s exactly fifteen dollars,” I told her.

She pulled out a twenty and wanted to give me a tip, but I insisted on the five dollars change. Generally when people are anxious about the cab fare, they don’t have a real lot of money to splash around, and I wasn’t about to dig into the limited funds of a travelling student.

I pulled her bags out, and looking at the flight of steps up to the entrance, hoisted the heavier of the two. She wasn’t keen on this. “It’s too heavy!” she protested.

I laughed. She was a tiny thing, and if she thought the bag too heavy for me, it was definitely a load for her. We went up the steps, I set the bag down, and here she was, fumbling with her purse again. “Let me give you a tip,” she started, but I shushed her.

“I don’t need a tip, just a smile!”

And I got a smile from her. A big smile and a cheerful wave as I reversed the cab back into the evening traffic.

I love my job.

Road works


My road most travelled is the one out to the airport. Every day, ten or more times, sometimes racing along at the limit, cutting the corners fine, sometimes taking it easy with passengers.

“Boy,” one said, “I’ll bet you wish you had a dollar for every time you’ve driven along this road!”

“Oddly enough,” I replied, “that’s how it works out.”

The road works have been going on for months now. The two lanes are to be upgraded to four, a new overpass and airport entrance constructed, intersections realigned...

Not to mention the roadworks inside the airport boundaries as the taxi rank is shifted, a new multi-story carpark erected, the terminal building extended...

“Every day’s a new adventure out here,” I tell the passengers, when suddenly confronted with new traffic flows that represent a radical departure from the previous day’s arrangements.

For a couple of kilometres, it’s nothing but bollards, cement barriers, diversion signs, road machinery, uneven surfaces and dust. And drivers struggling to cope with it all.

Just what I need when I’m racing someone to the airport to catch a tight flight.

But at least the promise of a new road is an improvement over what we had. It looked like a country lane, meandering along beside the Molonglo River, and passengers would ask their cabbie why he was taking them “the back way”.

It was upgraded a while back, but it remained mostly one lane each way, with a series of roundabouts where keen or crazy drivers raged for position. The increasing flow of traffic to and from the airport and the associated office park and wholesale shops frequently brought the road to a crawl, with some critical intersections choked shut.

“Another ten years,” I tell my passengers, “and this will all be four lanes.”

In reality, it’s another two weeks and it will be finished. All complete except for the obligatory Canberra road planning bottleneck, where a narrow bridge over a creek needs to be duplicated before the grand project is done.

And then, I guess, the road crews will move elsewhere in Canberra to make driving a challenge.



Brain surgery


I had a bad start to the day. The computer system wouldn’t turn on. Pressed all the buttons, jiggled all the cables, checked all the fuses. Nothing.

Blast. Just as the busy period began. Drove to the workshop out at Fyshwick and the mechanic pressed all the buttons, jiggled all the cables, checked all the fuses, popped his head under the dashboard. “Fifty dollar fee for soiling the cab,” I told him. “Wires are frayed,” he said, and so they were.

“You’ll have to take it out to the electricians,” he said, so off I went to Premier Instruments in Dickson, where the mechanic pressed all the buttons, jiggled all the cables, checked all the fuses. “The wires are frayed,” I said, pointing out the place.

“So they are,” he said, pulled down the back seat and checked the computer boxes tucked away there. “Not good. I think that’s cooked the brain. You’ll have to take it to the base.”

Back to the taxi company base in Fyshwick, steering my empty way through the streams of cabs, all of them full of passengers.

The technician didn’t bother with all the jiggling. “Think we’ve worked out what happened,” he said. Apparently the software had been updated remotely and it had gone to the wrong cabs. Logging out forced a software update, so after my day driver signed out, the system loaded an update, failed and went to sleep.

He pulled down the back seat, unscrewed the brain box, installed a fresh one, and got me on the air again. Off I went, just as another cabbie came in to have his brain replaced.

Yanking and banking


Picked up a merry bunch from the Red Hill restaurant. It sits on the ridge above Parliament House and has a fantastic view out over the sparkling city. She sat in the front, guided me and praised my music, while the three blokes sat in the back and wisecracked.

“Is that Glen Campbell?” she asked.

I cranked up “Wichita Lineman”. “Yes, it is. One of my favorites.”

A desolate song, and one that has given me a little satisfaction recently in decoding a line of the lyrics that had eluded me for decades.

And if it snows, that stretch down south won’t ever stand the strain.

I’d never been able to link snow with a stretch of wire. Not knowing much about snow, you see. I’d heard the word as “nose” or “knows”, and the line made no sense in my mind.

But I digress. There was a comment from the back seat. “Those Yanks are good at making their lives into songs: I am a Wichita Lineman, I’m a Wall Street Stockman...”

I liked that. A Wall Street stockman chasing a herd of bulls through the concrete canyons.

I fiddled around in my head for a bit, trying to think of a catchy, award-winning song that would go over big with the American audience in these days when the economy is pursued by bears.

Couldn’t come up with something Glen Campbell could sell a million copies, but the offer is now out there. A packet of Tim-Tams for the first reader to come up with a number-one charter.