They call him the Sheik
Aug. 27th, 2007 09:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skyringWe’ve been having trouble with the battery in the cab. As with all cabs, merely turning off the ignition doesn’t necessarily turn off all the equipment, and there are a tonne of add-ons that drain power. The radio, security cameras, despatch/GPS screen, EFTPOS machine, printer...
Actually, it’s been Jamie, the day driver, who has been having problems. If I drop the car off at three in the morning and he doesn’t start driving until five or so, then that two hour gap has been enough to drop the battery down to critical levels. Add in the fact that he’s recently been crook with the flu and just getting out of bed has been a struggle some days, and let’s just say that the jumper leads have been getting a work out.
After the car needed a jump start the other day, Jamie ran me through the steps to take in order to disconnect all the additional equipment. We’ve got kill switches for the main computer and the credit card machine, but the security cameras and other stuff need me to rummage around under the hood and pull out plugs. Not always easy to find at three on a cold winter morning, but I hold my torch in my teeth and do the job.
Even then that sometimes isn’t enough. Jamie got up to start work one day, looked in the secret place where we hide the keys, and found they weren’t there. This has always been a fear of mine, that I’d lock the cab, automatically slip the keys into my pocket, and drive off home, to be awakened in due course by the day driver fuming from the other side of the city.
Naturally, he blamed me for the keys not being in the right place, and he was right, but at least I hadn’t driven home with them. Instead he found them still in the ignition.
Ooops. At the end of a long shift, I’m tired and prone to make mistakes. Evidently the extra effort of checking under the hood to pull out the power plugs for the cameras had been enough to make me forgetful about the keys.
Douple oops. Just leaving the key in the ignition had meant that a few small light bulbs had remained lit, draining power from our precarious battery, and once again Jamie had to use his own car to jump start the cab.
What we really need is a better battery. “I’ll duck around to the workshop when I get a chance,” Jamie promised.
The workshop, which is also the office, hasn’t been its normal self recently. There have been emotional crises and separations, leading to a change at the top. The owner/manager, a superb leader and organiser, has taken himself elsewhere, leaving the fleet in the hands of his father-in-law, Hassim.
Hassim is a Canberra cabbie of long standing, and all the old drivers recall him with affection from the days before uniforms were mandatory, and he drove in traditional dress, complete to a long white gown and a little round cap topping off a bearded face. They called him “The Sheik”.
He still gets around in this rig, apparently, even if he no longer drives a shift, but I haven’t been into the workshop for a while. It’s usually the day driver who gets lumbered with all the service tasks, mostly because the night shifts operate outside business hours when all the mechanics have gone home and get some sleep.
Sleep management is one of my major concerns these days. If I’m tired, I make mistakes, and there are only so many mistakes you can get away with when you are driving a night cab in an environment rich with drunk people and kangaroos.
If I find myself growing tired, I don’t wait for the microsleeps to start, or rely on the passenger to keep me awake. “When I die,” I tell the bloke beside me in the front seat, “I want to go like my grandfather, gently and peacefully in my sleep, and not screaming in terror like his passengers.”
That usually keeps both of us wide awake.
But if I get tired, I either end the shift early and go home, or I find a dark spot, park the car, crank the seat back and zonk off for a while. Even a fifteen minute power nap is enough to keep me going for the rest of the shift.
As it happens, Canberra is well provided with little bits of darkness. There are parks and recreation areas in even the most built-up suburbs, and in between the town centres there are belts of bushland. The driveway up to the Yarralumla Woolshed is a good spot, as is the lane leading to the horse paddocks off Athlon Drive. I have my favourite spots, away from street lights and out of the glare of oncoming traffic.
Last Friday night, about midnight, I took a passenger all the way out to Jerrabomberra, over the border, south of Queanbeyan. A bit out of my regular track. Feeling a teensy bit tired towards the end of my driving week, and decided to pull over for a kip somewhere before getting stuck into the Saturday morning wheel home the ratty drunks routine.
Queanbeyan isn’t quite the garden city that Canberra is, and every time I found a patch of green parkland on the map, I’d find that it was too public, or too well provided with streetlamps for ease of sleeping. I don’t want people walking past the cab chatting while I’m trying to sleep with a neon glare on my face.
Eventually I looked into the Queanbeyan racetrack. They have a carpark which is just fantastic. Long and skinny, I drove in about five hundred metres, found a nice big tree to shield me from a distant lamppost, reclined the seat way back, took off my shoes, hit the central locking and zonked off.
Well, it had been a long week, and although I woke after half an hour, the lure of further sleep overcame my interest in getting more drunks home from nightclubs, and I rolled over and kipped out again.
It was somewhere within a tick-tock of one in the morning when I finally roused myself enough to get back on the road. I put my shoes back on, groped around for my glasses, sat up and turned the key. Nothing. I tried again, the engine fired and died immediately. No matter what I did after that, it wouldn’t start. Odd, because as far as I could tell, I still had a healthy charge in the battery. The headlights worked, the computer booted up, the radio worked when I rang base and told them I was broken down...
And vastly interested base was, once I told them I didn’t have any passengers in the car.
I figured that the car must be broken in some way, and I was in a right fix. I was several hundred metres away from the nearest street, it was the middle of the night, I didn’t have the phone number of the new manager, and the lead driver of our Silver Service fleet wasn’t answering on our phone. I left a message on the mechanic’s phone, but that wasn’t going to help me. Not for several hours, if he was working on the weekend, anyway.
I got out my torch and peered under the hood. There didn’t seem to be anything wrong, though I must admit that if there was, I probably couldn’t pick it anyway, modern engines being what they are, with a tonne of taxi electrics piled on top of the LPG conversion.
I knew that base could direct another taxi to me with jumper leads, but I was pretty sure that it wasn’t a flat battery. My options were dwindling. On the one hand, I didn’t want to leave the taxi in a remote location, but on the other hand, there didn’t seem to be anything further I could do, and the longer I stayed, the colder it was going to get, and whatever was left in the battery would disappear and make my situation even more desperate.
If there had been a moon, I would have gone out and howled at it, but instead I rang up base on the radio and asked them to contact our lead driver, who could at least retrieve me, leaving the cab to be picked up by the mechanic in due course.
They passed on my message, and in a few minutes my phone chirped. “Yeah,” said Gordon, the head driver, “I can be there in ten, fifteen minutes.”
And he was. I saw his lights approaching, got out and waved my torch at him as the headlights swept over the car. And disappeared.
I felt like a marooned survivor on a desert island frantically signalling to the diminishing search planes. I flashed my torch, jumped up and down, and hoped that he would spot me in his rear view mirror.
Blast. A final flash of tail lights and he was gone, leaving me alone with a broken down cab in the best, darkest, most private midnight napping place I’d ever found.
But of course, this is the day of the mobile phone, and I rang through the darkness to a puzzled Gordon, asking him to try again, just a little bit further this time.
And he did, sweeping up in a blaze of electric light, parking nose to nose, “We’ll just try the old jump start, see what happens, eh?”
We ran the leads over, I turned the key, and feeling like the happiest idiot in the world, my cab fired up. I approached Gordon as he coiled up his jumper leads, offering him a twenty.
“No need for that,” he said. “But you can buy me a coffee in the Shell servo on Tharwa Road.”
I followed him to the service station, and while the cab idled outside, we took our comfort in machine coffee and an elderly doughnut.
“Funny thing happened the other week,” Gordon mused. “I was at the airport, sitting there minding my own business, watching the security guys up ahead giving the cabbies a hard time. It was just after the bombing at Glasgow Airport, and everyone was a bit on their toes, but what it boiled down to was that you got hassled if you parked a bit too close to the zebra crossing.
“Anyway, there I was, waiting for my turn to go through the boom gate and onto the rank when someone opens the back door and slings in a bag. Big bag, it was. I looked out and there’s this guy in Islamic clothes, full beard, funny little hat, the whole bit. I near wet myself. He opens the front door, sits down beside me, takes one look at my face and bursts out laughing.
“He’d just come in from Sydney, and figured that he wasn’t going to pay money to a stranger when there was one of his own Silver Service cabs available.”
“Ah!” I said, “It was Hassim!”
“Yeah,” Gordon said, draining his cardboard cup, “Nice bloke.”
We got back in our cabs and drove off in different directions, Gordon down to Tuggeranong to end his shift, me back into Civic to pick up a few nightclubbers and try to make a few dollars to salvage the night.
Actually, it’s been Jamie, the day driver, who has been having problems. If I drop the car off at three in the morning and he doesn’t start driving until five or so, then that two hour gap has been enough to drop the battery down to critical levels. Add in the fact that he’s recently been crook with the flu and just getting out of bed has been a struggle some days, and let’s just say that the jumper leads have been getting a work out.
After the car needed a jump start the other day, Jamie ran me through the steps to take in order to disconnect all the additional equipment. We’ve got kill switches for the main computer and the credit card machine, but the security cameras and other stuff need me to rummage around under the hood and pull out plugs. Not always easy to find at three on a cold winter morning, but I hold my torch in my teeth and do the job.
Even then that sometimes isn’t enough. Jamie got up to start work one day, looked in the secret place where we hide the keys, and found they weren’t there. This has always been a fear of mine, that I’d lock the cab, automatically slip the keys into my pocket, and drive off home, to be awakened in due course by the day driver fuming from the other side of the city.
Naturally, he blamed me for the keys not being in the right place, and he was right, but at least I hadn’t driven home with them. Instead he found them still in the ignition.
Ooops. At the end of a long shift, I’m tired and prone to make mistakes. Evidently the extra effort of checking under the hood to pull out the power plugs for the cameras had been enough to make me forgetful about the keys.
Douple oops. Just leaving the key in the ignition had meant that a few small light bulbs had remained lit, draining power from our precarious battery, and once again Jamie had to use his own car to jump start the cab.
What we really need is a better battery. “I’ll duck around to the workshop when I get a chance,” Jamie promised.
The workshop, which is also the office, hasn’t been its normal self recently. There have been emotional crises and separations, leading to a change at the top. The owner/manager, a superb leader and organiser, has taken himself elsewhere, leaving the fleet in the hands of his father-in-law, Hassim.
Hassim is a Canberra cabbie of long standing, and all the old drivers recall him with affection from the days before uniforms were mandatory, and he drove in traditional dress, complete to a long white gown and a little round cap topping off a bearded face. They called him “The Sheik”.
He still gets around in this rig, apparently, even if he no longer drives a shift, but I haven’t been into the workshop for a while. It’s usually the day driver who gets lumbered with all the service tasks, mostly because the night shifts operate outside business hours when all the mechanics have gone home and get some sleep.
Sleep management is one of my major concerns these days. If I’m tired, I make mistakes, and there are only so many mistakes you can get away with when you are driving a night cab in an environment rich with drunk people and kangaroos.
If I find myself growing tired, I don’t wait for the microsleeps to start, or rely on the passenger to keep me awake. “When I die,” I tell the bloke beside me in the front seat, “I want to go like my grandfather, gently and peacefully in my sleep, and not screaming in terror like his passengers.”
That usually keeps both of us wide awake.
But if I get tired, I either end the shift early and go home, or I find a dark spot, park the car, crank the seat back and zonk off for a while. Even a fifteen minute power nap is enough to keep me going for the rest of the shift.
As it happens, Canberra is well provided with little bits of darkness. There are parks and recreation areas in even the most built-up suburbs, and in between the town centres there are belts of bushland. The driveway up to the Yarralumla Woolshed is a good spot, as is the lane leading to the horse paddocks off Athlon Drive. I have my favourite spots, away from street lights and out of the glare of oncoming traffic.
Last Friday night, about midnight, I took a passenger all the way out to Jerrabomberra, over the border, south of Queanbeyan. A bit out of my regular track. Feeling a teensy bit tired towards the end of my driving week, and decided to pull over for a kip somewhere before getting stuck into the Saturday morning wheel home the ratty drunks routine.
Queanbeyan isn’t quite the garden city that Canberra is, and every time I found a patch of green parkland on the map, I’d find that it was too public, or too well provided with streetlamps for ease of sleeping. I don’t want people walking past the cab chatting while I’m trying to sleep with a neon glare on my face.
Eventually I looked into the Queanbeyan racetrack. They have a carpark which is just fantastic. Long and skinny, I drove in about five hundred metres, found a nice big tree to shield me from a distant lamppost, reclined the seat way back, took off my shoes, hit the central locking and zonked off.
Well, it had been a long week, and although I woke after half an hour, the lure of further sleep overcame my interest in getting more drunks home from nightclubs, and I rolled over and kipped out again.
It was somewhere within a tick-tock of one in the morning when I finally roused myself enough to get back on the road. I put my shoes back on, groped around for my glasses, sat up and turned the key. Nothing. I tried again, the engine fired and died immediately. No matter what I did after that, it wouldn’t start. Odd, because as far as I could tell, I still had a healthy charge in the battery. The headlights worked, the computer booted up, the radio worked when I rang base and told them I was broken down...
And vastly interested base was, once I told them I didn’t have any passengers in the car.
I figured that the car must be broken in some way, and I was in a right fix. I was several hundred metres away from the nearest street, it was the middle of the night, I didn’t have the phone number of the new manager, and the lead driver of our Silver Service fleet wasn’t answering on our phone. I left a message on the mechanic’s phone, but that wasn’t going to help me. Not for several hours, if he was working on the weekend, anyway.
I got out my torch and peered under the hood. There didn’t seem to be anything wrong, though I must admit that if there was, I probably couldn’t pick it anyway, modern engines being what they are, with a tonne of taxi electrics piled on top of the LPG conversion.
I knew that base could direct another taxi to me with jumper leads, but I was pretty sure that it wasn’t a flat battery. My options were dwindling. On the one hand, I didn’t want to leave the taxi in a remote location, but on the other hand, there didn’t seem to be anything further I could do, and the longer I stayed, the colder it was going to get, and whatever was left in the battery would disappear and make my situation even more desperate.
If there had been a moon, I would have gone out and howled at it, but instead I rang up base on the radio and asked them to contact our lead driver, who could at least retrieve me, leaving the cab to be picked up by the mechanic in due course.
They passed on my message, and in a few minutes my phone chirped. “Yeah,” said Gordon, the head driver, “I can be there in ten, fifteen minutes.”
And he was. I saw his lights approaching, got out and waved my torch at him as the headlights swept over the car. And disappeared.
I felt like a marooned survivor on a desert island frantically signalling to the diminishing search planes. I flashed my torch, jumped up and down, and hoped that he would spot me in his rear view mirror.
Blast. A final flash of tail lights and he was gone, leaving me alone with a broken down cab in the best, darkest, most private midnight napping place I’d ever found.
But of course, this is the day of the mobile phone, and I rang through the darkness to a puzzled Gordon, asking him to try again, just a little bit further this time.
And he did, sweeping up in a blaze of electric light, parking nose to nose, “We’ll just try the old jump start, see what happens, eh?”
We ran the leads over, I turned the key, and feeling like the happiest idiot in the world, my cab fired up. I approached Gordon as he coiled up his jumper leads, offering him a twenty.
“No need for that,” he said. “But you can buy me a coffee in the Shell servo on Tharwa Road.”
I followed him to the service station, and while the cab idled outside, we took our comfort in machine coffee and an elderly doughnut.
“Funny thing happened the other week,” Gordon mused. “I was at the airport, sitting there minding my own business, watching the security guys up ahead giving the cabbies a hard time. It was just after the bombing at Glasgow Airport, and everyone was a bit on their toes, but what it boiled down to was that you got hassled if you parked a bit too close to the zebra crossing.
“Anyway, there I was, waiting for my turn to go through the boom gate and onto the rank when someone opens the back door and slings in a bag. Big bag, it was. I looked out and there’s this guy in Islamic clothes, full beard, funny little hat, the whole bit. I near wet myself. He opens the front door, sits down beside me, takes one look at my face and bursts out laughing.
“He’d just come in from Sydney, and figured that he wasn’t going to pay money to a stranger when there was one of his own Silver Service cabs available.”
“Ah!” I said, “It was Hassim!”
“Yeah,” Gordon said, draining his cardboard cup, “Nice bloke.”
We got back in our cabs and drove off in different directions, Gordon down to Tuggeranong to end his shift, me back into Civic to pick up a few nightclubbers and try to make a few dollars to salvage the night.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
ooohhh
Date: 2007-08-28 10:10 am (UTC)