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May. 9th, 2007 01:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skyringLast night was my final shift with Taxi 165. Tomorrow I take up a new path, with a new uniform. But for today, I’ll think fondly of my “limousine”.
A sweet car, the best of the half dozen cabs I’ve driven. Just yesterday a passenger got in at the airport and said, “This is the cleanest cab I’ve ever been in.”
Music to my ears. Lionel and I put some effort into keeping it clean, and I’m often seen on ranks at odd moments, shaking out the floor mats or polishing the windows. I give it a wash and a vacuum almost every shift, and I keep the air freshener charged. I had to chuckle to myself the other day. I was stopped at some lights and I saw a few light coloured fibres against the dark grey of the mats so I bent down, plucked them up, wound down my window and dumped them out. The driver alongside wouldn’t have seen anything, because they were so small and light-coloured.
The autumn leaves have been causing me trouble. Passengers will get in with some dead leaf matter on their shoes and next time I look there are fragments of dried leaf all over. Sometimes I have to get out the brush from the boot to sweep them all up.
Then again, yesterday was a fine sunny day, and driving through the avenues lined with trees in their autumn foliage was a pleasure indeed. The sun shone through the leaves and every now and then I’d round a corner and there would be a tree just blazing in gold or scarlet, or some shade in between. Glorious.
My passengers must wonder sometimes why their driver is smiling to himself. And I get paid to do this!
There have been a few niggles with Taxi 165. At one stage it was failing to start at odd moments, and Lionel and I both lost several hours of work. The mechanics were puzzled, but eventually we deduced that there was a reason why the cheap gas we were buying was so cheap, and after we went back to the regular grade, the problems cleared up.
The bonnet release catch is broken and sometimes falls down around my feet, an odd feeling when I’m negotiating a roundabout on the way to the airport. Once the air freshener was installed upside down and a little fluid leaked out, etching into the smooth plastic of the dashboard.
But, by and large, it’s a lovely car to drive and I took a great deal of pride in being the driver.
Perhaps, as the leaves begin to pile up on the nature strips, it’s time for me to look back on the past six months. Mid-October was my first shift, and I’d been waiting months for the day to arrive. Boy, was I keen to start, and when I got going, I suddenly discovered all the little details they don’t tell you in taxi school. Like how to turn the meter off.
At first I relied on my little GPS navigator, but after a bit I began to understand that while it was convenient to have the little robot voice tell me, “Bear left, take the third exit at the roundabout, go right,” and so on, I wasn’t learning a real lot. I left the navigator off thereafter and just used the GPS as a scrolling map. When I got a call to an unknown address (and with ten thousand streets in Canberra, there’s a lot of streets I don’t know), I’d pull out the street directory and plot a route. That set the neurons into motion and next time I had to do something similar, I'd remember the route.
Nowadays I find that when the passenger gives me an address, my brain kind of goes away for a moment and when it comes back there’s the route laid out for me. I’ll still occasionally ask the passenger if they have a preferred route, and every now and then I’ll find a new shortcut, but for the most part, navigation around Canberra is a doddle, and I like to think that I take the most efficient route. Every now and then I’ll duck down a series of sidestreets and you can almost feel the tension rising as the passengers wonder where this crazy driver is going. And then, magically, we’ll emerge at their destination and smiles all round.
I’m even beginning to get a feel for the labyrinth of Forrest, which is where Walter Burley Griffin put some of his more perplexing flourishes on the city plan. His intention was to make a mandala, a design that draws the eye in, and I’m here to say that when translated to actual streets and intersections on the ground, it sucks. But I’m learning a few good short cuts straight through the middle.
Perhaps the biggest difference has been my driving style. I now have such a fine feel for the dimensions and the performance of the car that I can place it precisely on the road, doing a u-turn on a crowded taxi rank to end up exactly the right distance behind the cab ahead. I know the exact best speeds for various roundabouts and corners. I know exactly where the corners of the car are.
Perhaps the wonder is that, given the amount of close manoeuvring I do, I haven’t yet scraped the bumpers or sides of the car. Trust me, I get into some pretty tight driveways!
On the road, I can go from point to point in times that I would not have believed six months ago. I rarely go more than a few kilometres above the speed limit, and I’m not at all an aggressive driver, but the whole city of Canberra seems to have shrunk for me. I’ve become a cheekier driver, finding gaps in traffic that once would have frightened me, sliding through an intersection on the very last of the amber, finding the best line through a roundabout and coming out a few cars ahead.
I’ve become a smarter driver, taking note of traffic rhythms and traffic light cycles to modify my routes. What works at one time of the day doesn’t work at all six hours later. What is a fast run in one direction turns into a confusion of one way streets and blocked intersections the other way. The aim is to know how the traffic flows and to go with it, or better yet, beat it.
I’ve always liked driving, and I like it more than ever now. It’s not just that I’m getting paid for it, or that I’m happy driving through a beautiful city, it’s that I’m more at home on the road than ever. Which is good, considering that for five days a week, I spend twelve hours a day in the car. If I didn’t like it, I’d be in a sad state.
Which brings me to sleep management. Basically, if I’m not driving, I’m sleeping. A shift is twelve hours, 3 PM to 3 AM, there’s a certain amount of time needed to get to and from the day driver’s place, not to mention time needed to prepare for the shift and to do the paperwork afterwards. Put in eight hours of sleep and there’s not a lot left over in a day.
And I need my sleep if I’m to drive safely. There’s no point in driving when fatigued. If I’m tired, I make mistakes, and while forgetting to turn the meter on or mixing up the suburbs of Mckellar and Macgregor is no more than inconvenient and embarrassing, if I do something stupid like go through a red light or misjudge my speed on a wet road, the consequences could be serious.
When I start making mistakes or I feel the need for a cat nap, I sign off and go home.
Because I’m on the road so much, I’m valuing my family time more than I used to. When I began driving, I worked six days a week, and while the money was good, my family never saw me; I’d either be asleep or away. My current schedule has me at home three evenings a week, and I get all day Sunday with the family.
The money is good. I’m earning more than I ever did as a programmer. There’s a new car, a round the world trip, and a bunch of electronic stuff. Not to mention a whole heap of CDs.
Perhaps the biggest change has been in my music tastes. I searched diligently for the perfect taxi music, and jazz is the best solution. At least for a night shift. During the day the mellow notes of Chet Baker’s trumpet don’t work quite so well. I need music that’s a little more, well, jazzier.
Nu jazz or funk seems to do the trick. One passenger recommended the band “Saint Germaine”, and I’ve been tracking down their albums. The sort of ambience I’m looking for is music to sip coffee by, music to relax the passengers, music that doesn’t intrude. I tried Frank Sinatra once, and a young lady passenger put her hands over her ears and squealed in pain.
Then again, I once played Nat King Cole and I had a drunk passenger give me a fat tip because he liked it so much. Perhaps the solution is a sound system that has more capacity. More disks. Maybe I should invest in an iPod.
Overall, I’ve enjoyed being a taxidriver. I might not fit the typical image of a taxidriver, considering myself a writer, a traveller, a BookCrosser rather than a taxidriver, but it’s been an enjoyable and productive six months.
A sweet car, the best of the half dozen cabs I’ve driven. Just yesterday a passenger got in at the airport and said, “This is the cleanest cab I’ve ever been in.”
Music to my ears. Lionel and I put some effort into keeping it clean, and I’m often seen on ranks at odd moments, shaking out the floor mats or polishing the windows. I give it a wash and a vacuum almost every shift, and I keep the air freshener charged. I had to chuckle to myself the other day. I was stopped at some lights and I saw a few light coloured fibres against the dark grey of the mats so I bent down, plucked them up, wound down my window and dumped them out. The driver alongside wouldn’t have seen anything, because they were so small and light-coloured.
The autumn leaves have been causing me trouble. Passengers will get in with some dead leaf matter on their shoes and next time I look there are fragments of dried leaf all over. Sometimes I have to get out the brush from the boot to sweep them all up.
Then again, yesterday was a fine sunny day, and driving through the avenues lined with trees in their autumn foliage was a pleasure indeed. The sun shone through the leaves and every now and then I’d round a corner and there would be a tree just blazing in gold or scarlet, or some shade in between. Glorious.
My passengers must wonder sometimes why their driver is smiling to himself. And I get paid to do this!
There have been a few niggles with Taxi 165. At one stage it was failing to start at odd moments, and Lionel and I both lost several hours of work. The mechanics were puzzled, but eventually we deduced that there was a reason why the cheap gas we were buying was so cheap, and after we went back to the regular grade, the problems cleared up.
The bonnet release catch is broken and sometimes falls down around my feet, an odd feeling when I’m negotiating a roundabout on the way to the airport. Once the air freshener was installed upside down and a little fluid leaked out, etching into the smooth plastic of the dashboard.
But, by and large, it’s a lovely car to drive and I took a great deal of pride in being the driver.
Perhaps, as the leaves begin to pile up on the nature strips, it’s time for me to look back on the past six months. Mid-October was my first shift, and I’d been waiting months for the day to arrive. Boy, was I keen to start, and when I got going, I suddenly discovered all the little details they don’t tell you in taxi school. Like how to turn the meter off.
At first I relied on my little GPS navigator, but after a bit I began to understand that while it was convenient to have the little robot voice tell me, “Bear left, take the third exit at the roundabout, go right,” and so on, I wasn’t learning a real lot. I left the navigator off thereafter and just used the GPS as a scrolling map. When I got a call to an unknown address (and with ten thousand streets in Canberra, there’s a lot of streets I don’t know), I’d pull out the street directory and plot a route. That set the neurons into motion and next time I had to do something similar, I'd remember the route.
Nowadays I find that when the passenger gives me an address, my brain kind of goes away for a moment and when it comes back there’s the route laid out for me. I’ll still occasionally ask the passenger if they have a preferred route, and every now and then I’ll find a new shortcut, but for the most part, navigation around Canberra is a doddle, and I like to think that I take the most efficient route. Every now and then I’ll duck down a series of sidestreets and you can almost feel the tension rising as the passengers wonder where this crazy driver is going. And then, magically, we’ll emerge at their destination and smiles all round.
I’m even beginning to get a feel for the labyrinth of Forrest, which is where Walter Burley Griffin put some of his more perplexing flourishes on the city plan. His intention was to make a mandala, a design that draws the eye in, and I’m here to say that when translated to actual streets and intersections on the ground, it sucks. But I’m learning a few good short cuts straight through the middle.
Perhaps the biggest difference has been my driving style. I now have such a fine feel for the dimensions and the performance of the car that I can place it precisely on the road, doing a u-turn on a crowded taxi rank to end up exactly the right distance behind the cab ahead. I know the exact best speeds for various roundabouts and corners. I know exactly where the corners of the car are.
Perhaps the wonder is that, given the amount of close manoeuvring I do, I haven’t yet scraped the bumpers or sides of the car. Trust me, I get into some pretty tight driveways!
On the road, I can go from point to point in times that I would not have believed six months ago. I rarely go more than a few kilometres above the speed limit, and I’m not at all an aggressive driver, but the whole city of Canberra seems to have shrunk for me. I’ve become a cheekier driver, finding gaps in traffic that once would have frightened me, sliding through an intersection on the very last of the amber, finding the best line through a roundabout and coming out a few cars ahead.
I’ve become a smarter driver, taking note of traffic rhythms and traffic light cycles to modify my routes. What works at one time of the day doesn’t work at all six hours later. What is a fast run in one direction turns into a confusion of one way streets and blocked intersections the other way. The aim is to know how the traffic flows and to go with it, or better yet, beat it.
I’ve always liked driving, and I like it more than ever now. It’s not just that I’m getting paid for it, or that I’m happy driving through a beautiful city, it’s that I’m more at home on the road than ever. Which is good, considering that for five days a week, I spend twelve hours a day in the car. If I didn’t like it, I’d be in a sad state.
Which brings me to sleep management. Basically, if I’m not driving, I’m sleeping. A shift is twelve hours, 3 PM to 3 AM, there’s a certain amount of time needed to get to and from the day driver’s place, not to mention time needed to prepare for the shift and to do the paperwork afterwards. Put in eight hours of sleep and there’s not a lot left over in a day.
And I need my sleep if I’m to drive safely. There’s no point in driving when fatigued. If I’m tired, I make mistakes, and while forgetting to turn the meter on or mixing up the suburbs of Mckellar and Macgregor is no more than inconvenient and embarrassing, if I do something stupid like go through a red light or misjudge my speed on a wet road, the consequences could be serious.
When I start making mistakes or I feel the need for a cat nap, I sign off and go home.
Because I’m on the road so much, I’m valuing my family time more than I used to. When I began driving, I worked six days a week, and while the money was good, my family never saw me; I’d either be asleep or away. My current schedule has me at home three evenings a week, and I get all day Sunday with the family.
The money is good. I’m earning more than I ever did as a programmer. There’s a new car, a round the world trip, and a bunch of electronic stuff. Not to mention a whole heap of CDs.
Perhaps the biggest change has been in my music tastes. I searched diligently for the perfect taxi music, and jazz is the best solution. At least for a night shift. During the day the mellow notes of Chet Baker’s trumpet don’t work quite so well. I need music that’s a little more, well, jazzier.
Nu jazz or funk seems to do the trick. One passenger recommended the band “Saint Germaine”, and I’ve been tracking down their albums. The sort of ambience I’m looking for is music to sip coffee by, music to relax the passengers, music that doesn’t intrude. I tried Frank Sinatra once, and a young lady passenger put her hands over her ears and squealed in pain.
Then again, I once played Nat King Cole and I had a drunk passenger give me a fat tip because he liked it so much. Perhaps the solution is a sound system that has more capacity. More disks. Maybe I should invest in an iPod.
Overall, I’ve enjoyed being a taxidriver. I might not fit the typical image of a taxidriver, considering myself a writer, a traveller, a BookCrosser rather than a taxidriver, but it’s been an enjoyable and productive six months.
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no subject
Date: 2007-05-09 02:24 pm (UTC)