The meter ticks over
Jan. 5th, 2007 02:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skyringTime became important last night. Normally I have Sunday night off, a well-deserved and needed rest time, but the owner enticed me into driving on New Years Eve. He also seduced Lionel, my day driver, who got to keep our car for the night, so I had a temporary mount.
Taxi 8, a veteran of over three quarters of a million kilometres. Not quite the beautiful limousine that Taxi 165 is, but certainly an experienced and trustworthy car. The day driver ran me over some of its quirks when I picked it up. “It idles roughly,” he informed me, “and it makes a bit of a racket. We’ve tried to find the source of the problem, but nobody can work it out. Not to worry, though – it won’t stall on you.”
It handled well enough, and everything seemed to be working fine. Mostly. No cruise control, and the CD player didn’t work. Minor niggles.
My plan for the night was to head out to Tuggeranong, the southernmost of Canberra’s satellite towns, and chase radio work all night. If things got slow, I’d head into Civic to ferry revelers home from the rank, but I knew that there would be a tonne of work around tonight.
However, I have to say that the afternoon was the calm before the storm, and I sat on the Tuggeranong rank, one of maybe half a dozen cabs in the area, waiting for jobs. I’d get one every twenty minutes or so, and I used the time in between to test out a new theory of beating other cabbies to radio work. My aim is to spend as little time on ranks as possible, and as much time as I can with a passenger in the seat and the wheels rolling. For a lot of cabbies, who pull up on a rank and then immediately get out, light up a cigarette and begin socializing with the other cabbies, well, they are at a disadvantage in finding work.
Me, I chase radio work. A passenger waiting on an empty cab rank will be reasonably certain that a cab will come along and take them away, but for someone who has made a phone booking, all sorts of uncertainties arise. The driver may not be able to find the address, they may pick up another passenger in error, they may have suffered some sort of breakdown...
Trusting an important meeting to a dubious robot booking system, an elderly cab and an all-too-human driver is placing a lot of eggs in one basket. So I aim to get to these passengers as soon as possible. Besides which, if they are left waiting, likely they will ring up and make another booking request and in the end one or more drivers will wind up on a wild goose chase, which doesn’t help anyone.
And of course, sometimes the passenger can get things wrong. One of my jobs that afternoon, as black clouds gathered in the south, was to an address in the Tuggeranong suburb of Richardson for a 16:30 pickup. I love these pre-booked jobs, because I generally get ten minutes warning which is usually enough for me to arrive well ahead of the booked time, thereby delighting the passenger, who hops into a happy cab.
I was a few minutes early, and although there was nobody waiting, that was OK. Presumably they were inside preparing themselves for the scheduled booking. I waited a minute with the engine running, and then switched off and knocked on the door. A man answered, and the blank look on his face told me everything I needed to know.
“No we didn’t order a cab,” he said. “I’ll just check with the wife, but...”
He disappeared inside and reappeared a minute later, glaring at me. “You’re supposed to arrive at 4:30 AM,” he snapped. “That’s 0430 tomorrow.”
“I’ll just go contact base and fix that up,” I replied. I might have just spent twenty minutes waiting and five driving for a call that turned out to be worthless, but at least I could smile and do my best to sort things out.
I contacted base on the radio and got them to amend the booking. They slotted me back into the first position for radio work, and in a few minutes I had another job, to go and collect someone from the local shopping centre, and take them and their swag of party food home before the rain began falling. Those clouds on the horizon were coming up steadily, and it looked like a ripper. I hoped that it didn’t include hail, because my options for getting the cab under cover were limited.
I collected my passengers just as the first drops began, got them safely home, albeit a trifle damp, and headed out into the growing downpour. Driving conditions rapidly deteriorated and my estimate of the time I needed to get to my next job washed away in the water flooding across the road. Normally, like around midnight, I can travel between the suburbs of Kambah and Banks in just over ten minutes, but not with rain obscuring my vision and puddles growing out from the gutters. I then splashed my way up to Woden, where I pulled as far under the portico of the Hellenic Club as possible to let my passenger, a lady in a beautiful gown, disembark in style and minimal moisture.
The hail began as I headed south along the Tuggeranong Parkway to my next job. Not big hail, and not a lot of it, but enough to worry me. If it got any worse, I was out here on the road, five minutes from the nearest dubious shelter of a service station forecourt.
Messages came flooding in from base, relayed from my fellow cabbies. Water over the road on the Monaro Highway, lights out on Hindmarsh Drive, Goldstein Avenue collapsed.
That last one was startling. How could a road collapse? Maybe it was a culvert or maybe a bridge, but it seemed unlikely – the weather was fierce enough with torrential rain, hail, lighting and wind, but not of infrastructure-downing intensity. I mentally marked Goldstein Avenue as a place to investigate, but not just now.
The storm, and the stream of messages, moved away and dwindled into the northside. Roads cleared and I resumed the evening’s business of getting partygoers to their celebrations. Steady work, but nothing like the frenzy I’d been led to expect. Perhaps the rain persuaded people to stay home.
A pity, because the council had laid on fireworks over City Hill and Lake Burley Griffin. Always a great sight on a warm evening, families come out for the early fireworks at nine o’clock, and the main celebrations are at midnight. Traffic congestion is legendary when they finish and everyone climbs into their cars to return home. There was also a free concert in town, and several streets had been sealed off, as I discovered when I took a couple of passengers in.
I stayed in town as little as possible. Dealing with blocked streets and rowdy crowds of drunks is not my idea of taxidriver heaven. Instead, as soon as I could get away, I headed back out to Tuggeranong, rejecting a string of radio jobs as I sped south along the Parkway until I got back into the Wanniassa-Chisholm-Calwell-Banks areas, where I could be reasonably certain of steady work shuttling folk between these suburbs.
A good strategy, because as the evening progressed, most of Canberra’s cabs got tangled up in the central area, and the few cabs in Tuggeranong had continuous work. In fact, there was too much work for the few cabs available, and jobs began to pile up and get old.
My final job before midnight was to collect four young women, who were running late for their party, way down in Gordon. I avoided the emergency vehicles attending to storm damage in Chisholm and threaded my way through muddy streets, some with piles of hail pushed to the sides.
“We’ve got to get there before midnight!” came the wail from the backseat, “Oooh, is that the time?”
We all looked at the flashing figures on the dashboard. 11:51, they blinked at us. I turned the radio on, so that we could monitor the progress of the official countdown, and the ride turned into a race between time and distance.
“Go left here, take the third right, and it’s about halfway along,” 11:55 Another of my passengers got onto her mobile phone and alerted the hosts, “We’re in a taxi, just coming along Woodcock Road.”
“They won’t start until you arrive,” I reassured them as the minutes ticked away and I passed down darkened streets, climbing up into the remoter regions of Gordon.
11:57, and a trio of capering silhouettes danced onto the road to greet us. My passengers shrieked out, laughing, hugging their way into the arms of their friends. Someone thrust a couple of notes at me, giggling “Thanks for getting us here in time; you’re the best, cabbie!” and then they were gone inside to champagne and dancing, while I navigated back down to my next job.
11:59. Where were my hugs and bubbly drinks, I asked myself? It was just me and my cab, speeding downhill to a lonely roundabout, listening to an excited radio presenter count down the final seconds of 2006.
“...Three, Two, One, Happy New Year!”
Here I was, at the bottom end of Canberra, where the Tuggeranong Parkway made its final intersection and a few strands of barbed wire and a “Road Closed” sign barred any further progress south. Just me and my teddybear mascot. I pulled Ringbear off his dashboard perch, held his furry brown paw and waltzed him twice around the roundabout, with a couple of toots on the horn by way of exuberance.
And then on to my next job. The passengers became steadily more drunk as we moved towards dawn, but everyone was cheerful and full of optimism, swapping stories about the storm. Goldstein Avenue was reported as clear, and when I passed it I saw that huge banks of hailstones had been pushed to the verge, and that it had been a metre deep in ice at one stage. I winced inwardly as I felt wet dirt spatter my gleaming paintwork. There was a car bogged in the middle of the bitumen carpark of Richardson shops, mud and ice covering the surface in mounds a foot deep and onlookers shouting cheerful advice from the dry and firm edges. I paused as I passed, glad it wasn’t me.
And, just as the first rays of a new year came up over the horizon, I got another pre-booked job. Hmmm. Something familiar about that address. And the time. 04:30.
“Hey, I was here yesterday,” I told the passenger as she climbed in, ready to start an early morning shift at a fast food restaurant, “but the time was wrong.”
“Glad you got it right this time,” she replied grumpily. “It’s hell getting a cab down here in the morning.”
I gave up a little while after that. I was tired, all the cheerful drunks had gone off to bed, and those that were left made it hard for me to keep smiling. At least they didn’t fall asleep in the cab. I hate it when that happens, because they generally nod off before they have given me more than the name of the suburb, and when I arrive there I have to wake them up, and then wait for them to groggily sort out where they are and where they want to go.
But if I kept going much longer, my passengers would be prodding me awake. I found a 24-hour servo, gassed up, ran the cab through the carwash and gave the interior a good vacuum to get rid of all the mud that had found its way inside during the night.
I’d like to be able to report that I thought deep thoughts about my new career in a new year, while I drove my weary way home, but no, I was thinking about bed.
Taxi 8, a veteran of over three quarters of a million kilometres. Not quite the beautiful limousine that Taxi 165 is, but certainly an experienced and trustworthy car. The day driver ran me over some of its quirks when I picked it up. “It idles roughly,” he informed me, “and it makes a bit of a racket. We’ve tried to find the source of the problem, but nobody can work it out. Not to worry, though – it won’t stall on you.”
It handled well enough, and everything seemed to be working fine. Mostly. No cruise control, and the CD player didn’t work. Minor niggles.
My plan for the night was to head out to Tuggeranong, the southernmost of Canberra’s satellite towns, and chase radio work all night. If things got slow, I’d head into Civic to ferry revelers home from the rank, but I knew that there would be a tonne of work around tonight.
However, I have to say that the afternoon was the calm before the storm, and I sat on the Tuggeranong rank, one of maybe half a dozen cabs in the area, waiting for jobs. I’d get one every twenty minutes or so, and I used the time in between to test out a new theory of beating other cabbies to radio work. My aim is to spend as little time on ranks as possible, and as much time as I can with a passenger in the seat and the wheels rolling. For a lot of cabbies, who pull up on a rank and then immediately get out, light up a cigarette and begin socializing with the other cabbies, well, they are at a disadvantage in finding work.
Me, I chase radio work. A passenger waiting on an empty cab rank will be reasonably certain that a cab will come along and take them away, but for someone who has made a phone booking, all sorts of uncertainties arise. The driver may not be able to find the address, they may pick up another passenger in error, they may have suffered some sort of breakdown...
Trusting an important meeting to a dubious robot booking system, an elderly cab and an all-too-human driver is placing a lot of eggs in one basket. So I aim to get to these passengers as soon as possible. Besides which, if they are left waiting, likely they will ring up and make another booking request and in the end one or more drivers will wind up on a wild goose chase, which doesn’t help anyone.
And of course, sometimes the passenger can get things wrong. One of my jobs that afternoon, as black clouds gathered in the south, was to an address in the Tuggeranong suburb of Richardson for a 16:30 pickup. I love these pre-booked jobs, because I generally get ten minutes warning which is usually enough for me to arrive well ahead of the booked time, thereby delighting the passenger, who hops into a happy cab.
I was a few minutes early, and although there was nobody waiting, that was OK. Presumably they were inside preparing themselves for the scheduled booking. I waited a minute with the engine running, and then switched off and knocked on the door. A man answered, and the blank look on his face told me everything I needed to know.
“No we didn’t order a cab,” he said. “I’ll just check with the wife, but...”
He disappeared inside and reappeared a minute later, glaring at me. “You’re supposed to arrive at 4:30 AM,” he snapped. “That’s 0430 tomorrow.”
“I’ll just go contact base and fix that up,” I replied. I might have just spent twenty minutes waiting and five driving for a call that turned out to be worthless, but at least I could smile and do my best to sort things out.
I contacted base on the radio and got them to amend the booking. They slotted me back into the first position for radio work, and in a few minutes I had another job, to go and collect someone from the local shopping centre, and take them and their swag of party food home before the rain began falling. Those clouds on the horizon were coming up steadily, and it looked like a ripper. I hoped that it didn’t include hail, because my options for getting the cab under cover were limited.
I collected my passengers just as the first drops began, got them safely home, albeit a trifle damp, and headed out into the growing downpour. Driving conditions rapidly deteriorated and my estimate of the time I needed to get to my next job washed away in the water flooding across the road. Normally, like around midnight, I can travel between the suburbs of Kambah and Banks in just over ten minutes, but not with rain obscuring my vision and puddles growing out from the gutters. I then splashed my way up to Woden, where I pulled as far under the portico of the Hellenic Club as possible to let my passenger, a lady in a beautiful gown, disembark in style and minimal moisture.
The hail began as I headed south along the Tuggeranong Parkway to my next job. Not big hail, and not a lot of it, but enough to worry me. If it got any worse, I was out here on the road, five minutes from the nearest dubious shelter of a service station forecourt.
Messages came flooding in from base, relayed from my fellow cabbies. Water over the road on the Monaro Highway, lights out on Hindmarsh Drive, Goldstein Avenue collapsed.
That last one was startling. How could a road collapse? Maybe it was a culvert or maybe a bridge, but it seemed unlikely – the weather was fierce enough with torrential rain, hail, lighting and wind, but not of infrastructure-downing intensity. I mentally marked Goldstein Avenue as a place to investigate, but not just now.
The storm, and the stream of messages, moved away and dwindled into the northside. Roads cleared and I resumed the evening’s business of getting partygoers to their celebrations. Steady work, but nothing like the frenzy I’d been led to expect. Perhaps the rain persuaded people to stay home.
A pity, because the council had laid on fireworks over City Hill and Lake Burley Griffin. Always a great sight on a warm evening, families come out for the early fireworks at nine o’clock, and the main celebrations are at midnight. Traffic congestion is legendary when they finish and everyone climbs into their cars to return home. There was also a free concert in town, and several streets had been sealed off, as I discovered when I took a couple of passengers in.
I stayed in town as little as possible. Dealing with blocked streets and rowdy crowds of drunks is not my idea of taxidriver heaven. Instead, as soon as I could get away, I headed back out to Tuggeranong, rejecting a string of radio jobs as I sped south along the Parkway until I got back into the Wanniassa-Chisholm-Calwell-Banks areas, where I could be reasonably certain of steady work shuttling folk between these suburbs.
A good strategy, because as the evening progressed, most of Canberra’s cabs got tangled up in the central area, and the few cabs in Tuggeranong had continuous work. In fact, there was too much work for the few cabs available, and jobs began to pile up and get old.
My final job before midnight was to collect four young women, who were running late for their party, way down in Gordon. I avoided the emergency vehicles attending to storm damage in Chisholm and threaded my way through muddy streets, some with piles of hail pushed to the sides.
“We’ve got to get there before midnight!” came the wail from the backseat, “Oooh, is that the time?”
We all looked at the flashing figures on the dashboard. 11:51, they blinked at us. I turned the radio on, so that we could monitor the progress of the official countdown, and the ride turned into a race between time and distance.
“Go left here, take the third right, and it’s about halfway along,” 11:55 Another of my passengers got onto her mobile phone and alerted the hosts, “We’re in a taxi, just coming along Woodcock Road.”
“They won’t start until you arrive,” I reassured them as the minutes ticked away and I passed down darkened streets, climbing up into the remoter regions of Gordon.
11:57, and a trio of capering silhouettes danced onto the road to greet us. My passengers shrieked out, laughing, hugging their way into the arms of their friends. Someone thrust a couple of notes at me, giggling “Thanks for getting us here in time; you’re the best, cabbie!” and then they were gone inside to champagne and dancing, while I navigated back down to my next job.
11:59. Where were my hugs and bubbly drinks, I asked myself? It was just me and my cab, speeding downhill to a lonely roundabout, listening to an excited radio presenter count down the final seconds of 2006.
“...Three, Two, One, Happy New Year!”
Here I was, at the bottom end of Canberra, where the Tuggeranong Parkway made its final intersection and a few strands of barbed wire and a “Road Closed” sign barred any further progress south. Just me and my teddybear mascot. I pulled Ringbear off his dashboard perch, held his furry brown paw and waltzed him twice around the roundabout, with a couple of toots on the horn by way of exuberance.
And then on to my next job. The passengers became steadily more drunk as we moved towards dawn, but everyone was cheerful and full of optimism, swapping stories about the storm. Goldstein Avenue was reported as clear, and when I passed it I saw that huge banks of hailstones had been pushed to the verge, and that it had been a metre deep in ice at one stage. I winced inwardly as I felt wet dirt spatter my gleaming paintwork. There was a car bogged in the middle of the bitumen carpark of Richardson shops, mud and ice covering the surface in mounds a foot deep and onlookers shouting cheerful advice from the dry and firm edges. I paused as I passed, glad it wasn’t me.
And, just as the first rays of a new year came up over the horizon, I got another pre-booked job. Hmmm. Something familiar about that address. And the time. 04:30.
“Hey, I was here yesterday,” I told the passenger as she climbed in, ready to start an early morning shift at a fast food restaurant, “but the time was wrong.”
“Glad you got it right this time,” she replied grumpily. “It’s hell getting a cab down here in the morning.”
I gave up a little while after that. I was tired, all the cheerful drunks had gone off to bed, and those that were left made it hard for me to keep smiling. At least they didn’t fall asleep in the cab. I hate it when that happens, because they generally nod off before they have given me more than the name of the suburb, and when I arrive there I have to wake them up, and then wait for them to groggily sort out where they are and where they want to go.
But if I kept going much longer, my passengers would be prodding me awake. I found a 24-hour servo, gassed up, ran the cab through the carwash and gave the interior a good vacuum to get rid of all the mud that had found its way inside during the night.
I’d like to be able to report that I thought deep thoughts about my new career in a new year, while I drove my weary way home, but no, I was thinking about bed.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2007-01-07 08:54 am (UTC)