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Aug. 23rd, 2006 04:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skyringOK, the cat is out of the bag. My new career is taxidriving. If it doesn’t bring me riches, at least it will bring wonder and excitement, a lot of interesting people to meet for a short time, and a few good friends for a long time.
For the moment, my first day on the job is still about a month away, given the training and red-tape hoops I have to jump through.
My pre-course jockeying days are over, so the next step is the official training course. Mike, the cabbie who was teaching me, reckons I’m lucky, and that he had to do two weeks of training in two different locations. He drove me past the location of the old school in Downer. It’s closed down now, but the sign is still there, and he pointed out the palm trees under which the students took their breaks.
“Michael Butler was one of my instructors, and he’ll be teaching you next week,” Mike said. “He’s the tall one we met at the airport.”
Mike’s cab was rostered on for an inspection, and we had driven out to the airport where on one side of the cabbies’ car park a couple of Canberra Cabs officers had set up deck chairs under a tree. A cab would drive up and these two would set down their drinks and give it a look over. From my point of view Mike’s cab was about as spotless as a car could possibly get, but Mike had qualms.
“Sunday’s driver gave it a bit of a ding on the front bumper. They’ll pick that up for certain.”
It was only a tiny scrape; a lick of white paint would have fixed it right up, but indeed the inspectors spotted it and wrote out a notice for it to be fixed. They also chipped Mike for having dust on the inside of the door seals, but that was easily corrected with a wipe of a rag.
We drove past the workshop in Fyshwick where the cabs get fixed. The boss, the man who owns the cabs, has forty drivers working for him and presumably that means a couple of dozen cabs. I had a glance at the list of costs to run a cab in Canberra, and it is simply enormous. Everything from the light on top to the hard drive that holds the security camera photographs must be paid for. Not to mention licences and fees paid to the cab company that runs the dispatch system.
Each cab has to be running as close to 24 hours a day as possible to make a profit. Mike gets up well before dawn, and from about five o’clock on, he reckons “Nine out of ten, no, ten out of ten calls will be to the airport.”
Things ease off once the morning flights out of Canberra are gone, which is why Mike picked me up a few minutes after ten. The middle of the day is a quiet time, but there’s work around. We took a couple of public servants out to the Chilean Embassy at O’Malley, a nice solid fare. They were a bit surprised to see two people in the front seat, but Mike explained that I was a trainee – “a driver of the future”.
He spent a lot of time explaining things. The computer display by his right hand, which is linked to a GPS antenna and both controls the driver’s jobs and supplies information. It looks pretty complex, but he assured me that “if you can use an ATM, you can use this thing.”
I dunno. I’m finding that nowadays, operating a VCR or a cellphone is more and more of a struggle!
We sat in a city rank for a while. It has an odd system, whereby the cabs line up in two rows, the outer line reversing until they can slot across to the rear of the inner line, where they move forward until they get to the front and can pick up the next passenger. I was glad to know that – I could just imagine my future embarrassment if I unwittingly tried to horn in on the drivers already there!
Everything works on a queue system. All of Canberra is divided into zones, and within each zone the GPS receivers keep track of the cabs. If there are eight cabs in the Braddon zone, then when we drive into that zone, we tail onto the queue and must wait until eight radio dispatch jobs are given out to the cabs ahead of us.
We came back from O’Malley and got a radio job, picking a welfare agency representative up for a meeting in Hackett on the homeless situation. I got to talk with him a bit about homeless folk, telling him about the poor souls I had seen sleeping in the snow in Washington D.C. last year.
I was beginning to see how this job could be enjoyable. Each driver can cruise around looking for work, attaching himself to the zone queues and ranks, waiting at the airport, or just roaming around seeking a hail from the footpath. He sets his own pace, takes his breaks when he wants them, and if he monitors the computer efficiently, he can pick up some extra jobs. Inside knowledge is vital in this game, and I reckon that once I hit my stride, I’ll be able to compete aggressively.
Mike dropped me home around two o’clock, and I thanked him heartily for his time and his experience.
I’ve now got four days before my course begins, and I reckon I might start getting a bit of headway by memorizing locations of hotels, clubs, embassies and other points. Mike assures me that this information is sure to come up in the test!
For the moment, my first day on the job is still about a month away, given the training and red-tape hoops I have to jump through.
My pre-course jockeying days are over, so the next step is the official training course. Mike, the cabbie who was teaching me, reckons I’m lucky, and that he had to do two weeks of training in two different locations. He drove me past the location of the old school in Downer. It’s closed down now, but the sign is still there, and he pointed out the palm trees under which the students took their breaks.
“Michael Butler was one of my instructors, and he’ll be teaching you next week,” Mike said. “He’s the tall one we met at the airport.”
Mike’s cab was rostered on for an inspection, and we had driven out to the airport where on one side of the cabbies’ car park a couple of Canberra Cabs officers had set up deck chairs under a tree. A cab would drive up and these two would set down their drinks and give it a look over. From my point of view Mike’s cab was about as spotless as a car could possibly get, but Mike had qualms.
“Sunday’s driver gave it a bit of a ding on the front bumper. They’ll pick that up for certain.”
It was only a tiny scrape; a lick of white paint would have fixed it right up, but indeed the inspectors spotted it and wrote out a notice for it to be fixed. They also chipped Mike for having dust on the inside of the door seals, but that was easily corrected with a wipe of a rag.
We drove past the workshop in Fyshwick where the cabs get fixed. The boss, the man who owns the cabs, has forty drivers working for him and presumably that means a couple of dozen cabs. I had a glance at the list of costs to run a cab in Canberra, and it is simply enormous. Everything from the light on top to the hard drive that holds the security camera photographs must be paid for. Not to mention licences and fees paid to the cab company that runs the dispatch system.
Each cab has to be running as close to 24 hours a day as possible to make a profit. Mike gets up well before dawn, and from about five o’clock on, he reckons “Nine out of ten, no, ten out of ten calls will be to the airport.”
Things ease off once the morning flights out of Canberra are gone, which is why Mike picked me up a few minutes after ten. The middle of the day is a quiet time, but there’s work around. We took a couple of public servants out to the Chilean Embassy at O’Malley, a nice solid fare. They were a bit surprised to see two people in the front seat, but Mike explained that I was a trainee – “a driver of the future”.
He spent a lot of time explaining things. The computer display by his right hand, which is linked to a GPS antenna and both controls the driver’s jobs and supplies information. It looks pretty complex, but he assured me that “if you can use an ATM, you can use this thing.”
I dunno. I’m finding that nowadays, operating a VCR or a cellphone is more and more of a struggle!
We sat in a city rank for a while. It has an odd system, whereby the cabs line up in two rows, the outer line reversing until they can slot across to the rear of the inner line, where they move forward until they get to the front and can pick up the next passenger. I was glad to know that – I could just imagine my future embarrassment if I unwittingly tried to horn in on the drivers already there!
Everything works on a queue system. All of Canberra is divided into zones, and within each zone the GPS receivers keep track of the cabs. If there are eight cabs in the Braddon zone, then when we drive into that zone, we tail onto the queue and must wait until eight radio dispatch jobs are given out to the cabs ahead of us.
We came back from O’Malley and got a radio job, picking a welfare agency representative up for a meeting in Hackett on the homeless situation. I got to talk with him a bit about homeless folk, telling him about the poor souls I had seen sleeping in the snow in Washington D.C. last year.
I was beginning to see how this job could be enjoyable. Each driver can cruise around looking for work, attaching himself to the zone queues and ranks, waiting at the airport, or just roaming around seeking a hail from the footpath. He sets his own pace, takes his breaks when he wants them, and if he monitors the computer efficiently, he can pick up some extra jobs. Inside knowledge is vital in this game, and I reckon that once I hit my stride, I’ll be able to compete aggressively.
Mike dropped me home around two o’clock, and I thanked him heartily for his time and his experience.
I’ve now got four days before my course begins, and I reckon I might start getting a bit of headway by memorizing locations of hotels, clubs, embassies and other points. Mike assures me that this information is sure to come up in the test!
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Date: 2006-08-23 08:56 am (UTC)