RIP Betsy

I returned home from the USA on Sunday morning, ready to drive my first night cabbie shift on Monday evening, rightly assuming I’d be tired and not wanting to drive.
That was the night the owner crashed our lovely new cab.
And now the car is written off.
We only drove it for a month, enjoying every moment. While I was away my day driver felt so emotionally attached, he gave our silver cab a name: Betsy.
Heavens to Betsy, but she was the cab they drive in Paradise. so much to love about her. Automatic windscreen wipers, for example. They worked off a sensor, so you never had to fiddle with intermittent settings, or even turn it on. They were always on, and the more rain you got, the faster they went.
Just remember to turn them off before going through the car wash!
So many lovable little features. She had an auxiliary input, so we could plug our iPhones straight into the sound system.
Built-in Bluetooth. Auto up/down on the driver’s window. Clever lighting under the doors to reveal puddles before you stepped into them. Fog lights.
She was a delight to drive. I’d finish a thirteen hour shift, get out and stroke her silver flanks with real affection.
I never found her limits on the road, either. She always had more to give if I needed to overtake, or to grab that last half second of amber light. I felt in control, sure of myself and my place on the road.
And she was new. Well, a couple of years old, but for a cab, that’s new. The previous owners had looked after her, and my co-driver and I were taking good car
The only drawbacks were small ones, such as the fact that the drivers seat had no memory function, or that the A pillars were wide, creating a blind spot that could obscure oncoming traffic.
Passengers would get in, look around admiringly, and say something like, “This is the cleanest cab I’ve ever been in!”
Music to a cabbie’s soul!
She was beautiful, and now she’s gone. Saturday night the owner drives the best shift of the week. He was crossing Jerrabomberra Avenue, four lanes of traffic with a service road each side, paused to let two cars past, and then floored it in the cabbie way. Unfortunately, there was a third car, coming up from the left in the blind spot on that side, and he collected it in the middle.
No injuries, which is the main thing, but poor old Betsy had her front crumpled right in, headlights and bumper dangling. After a short period of hope, she was written off by the assessor.
So now we’re driving replacement cabs and wondering what we’ll get next as a permanent mount.

Update

Back into the swing of things.

Last Friday, I flew out of San Francisco after a glorious holiday. I am blest with some amazing friends, and I give thanks every day to Bookcrossing for being such a marvellous treasure of literate, generous, caring and quirky people.

Saturday. There was no Saturday, unless there were random bursts of it over the International Dateline, which we crossed somewhere near midnight. I looked out as dawn came, somewhere north of New Zealand, and the sight of the Southern Cross hanging over the wingtip told me I was back home again.

Sunday. We came in low over the coastline south of Sydney, circled around for the glide path over Botany Bay, and home again. Slight touch of giardia, and I really regretted picking up my bags as soon as I saw them on the carousel, because it seemed an age before I was through customs, rechecked, through security, on the transfer bus and into the lounge.

A couple of hours to spend having a shower, drinking coffee, catching up on email, and then the quick propjet flight to Canberra, where I was picked up by smiling family.

Distribution of goodies - the lollies/sweets/candy that had attracted the time-consuming interest of Customs - and then a nap. Somewhere along the way came the news that there wasn't going to be a cab for me to drive on Monday as planned. We went out to dinner at Mecca Bah in Manuka, coffee at Artoven, and life was good.

Monday and Tuesday just kind of passed by. The touch of the guts, a developing cold (probably pict up on the plane), and just general fatigue kept me in bed a lot of the time, so I was kind of glad there was no cab to drive, though heaven knows I need the income now.

Tuesday was especially galling, as it was Melbourne Cup day, and the night shift is a great one for earning money. Oh well. Went to see Kerri playing table tennis, and I drove back past the Kingston rank at about nine with no cabs and a lot of passengers waiting.

Wednesday, I pulled out the maps and dockets and tickets from the trip and began to paste them into my travel journal. Then the owner rings about noon, he's got a car ready and can I come pick it up? So I got DD to drive me over, picked up the cab, and had a nap before starting work at the usual time. I needed that nap.

Wednesday nights from now own are going to be taken up with Kerri's philosophy course, which takes about three hours out of the night. Enjoyable and intellectually stimulating. I spent a lot of time thinking hard about the material we were being given. It's fairly lightweight as philosophy goes, but the theme of the course ties in very well with my own recent thinking about how to make best use of my life.

Thursday was another light shift. It's quiet in Canberra, that's all there is to it. And there are too many cabs on the road. I bought a new modem - one without a wireless router.

Friday, I took advantage of an empty house to set up a new wireless network, feeding the modem into the Apple Time Capsule I bought a year ago. It claims that it will add into an existing network, but research (and experience) told me that unless that existing network was built on Apple products, forget it. So we now have a wireless network that cures many of the problems of the earlier one, does transparent backups, and enables wireless printing.

That night I bought an inverter for the car, running the Air off it. Typically I get maybe two hours of battery time, which isn't long enough to last me an entire shift. Particularly galling if I get hours of free time and want to do some work between passengers.

Saturday, we went shopping in the morning, and spent a lot of the rest of the day resting. Had a cider on the balcony in the late afternoon with Kerri and it was soooo pleasant. Lovely to be sitting out in the evening this time of year.