Embarrassing secrets from adolescence

She was from Dublin, and had an accent you could carve with a knife. Anyway, she and her two friends were heading into the Valley from their hotel in Toowong -- an $18 fare -- and she wanted me to change the radio station over from ABC NewsRadio to something she could sing along to.

Late-night passengers who want *their* choice of music in the cab can usually be right pains in the regions of the nether, but a good way of getting around it is by suggesting that they sing a-capella instead (a trick I learnt years ago when driving a wheelchair-accessible 10-seater).

So the trip down Milton Road was done to the accompaniment of the musical works of Jason Donovan. We all have an embarrassing secret from adolescence, and for the hopeful inheritor of Gerty McDowell it was a liking for Jason Donovan.

The next couple of fares, however, I could have well done without. An angry bloke, followed by a couple of argumentative teenage girls. The less said about the latter, the better. Suffice to say that it was the second time that night I went and hid from the fares so I could cool down (the first time was after a no-job due to some dingbat who taxi-raced (i.e.: book cabs with all the companies to see which one comes first).

There were plenty of good, polite fares too -- something I like about Sundays, and something that makes the shift feel more like a profitable playtime than 'work' -- but unfortunately two dickhead fares can easily cancel out the 30+ 'nice' people that preceded them.

Unt. Cassandra

At least I'm not the only person things like that happen to.

The job came through the radio right at the beginning of the shift. The pick-up address -- outside a convenience store on Ipswich Road in Woolloongabba -- didn't look promising, but my luck was in and he was still there when I arrived.

He'd left his car in the carpark of Woolloongabba's Norman Hotel the night before, having drunk too much to drive the 17km home to Geebung, and had rang for a taxi that morning to take him back to the Gabba to pick up his car.

But, after paying the cabbie the $30 taxi fare and watching its tail-lights disappear into the distance, he realised that now that both he and his car were in Woolloongabba, his car-keys were still sitting on the kitchen table back in Geebung.

Time for another $30 taxi ride back home.

All up, it was going to cost him around $100 just to get his car back home.

It turned out to be a day with a wide variety of passengers, ranging from a senior Federal politician to a quartet of 16-year-old girls tentatively exploring the boundaries of being grown-up.

But the most memorable was someone who the previous driver had encountered on Saturday night: someone who chose to leave her mark in lipstick on the back of the driver's head-rest.

I think her pre-nom must have been something like Cassandra. I'm certain her surname was Unt.

It would have been a spur-of-the-moment decision for young Cassandra to immortalise herself in lipstick on the head-rest, as these decisions tend to be and are later described as "it seemed like a good idea at the time."...

So Cassandra got her lippie out, but very quickly realised that there just wasn't enough room to write "Cassandra Unt" on the back of the driver's head-rest.

So she settled for leaving her initial instead.

C. Unt.

But she forgot to put the full stop after the initial "C"

Come Sunday, and Cassandra's signature turned out to be profitable for me as many of my passengers, after reading and mis-understanding the signature's meaning, decided out of sympathy to add about $5.00 in tips to whatever the meter read at the end of their journeys.

In a couple of cases, it turned out to be a $5.00 tip on top of a $5.00 fare.

Airport Mort

It's been a week when death was big in the news. Author Colin Thiele died at the week's beginning, and was buried on Thursday. Then Steve "Crocodile Hunter" Irwin was skewered by a stingray and landed up becoming some sort of local secular saint, with two days of large hagiographic supplements in the local press.

Irwin now looms, larger-than-death, from a billboard on Brisbane Airport's approach road to posthumously greet arriving travellers and entice them to his zoo near Landsborough.

It's probably not a wise thing to grab your camera when you're about to enter the city's most dangerous intersection, so I didn't get a photo of the motorcade that entered Airport Drive just before me.

The first car was a gleaming white Fairlane flying a red flag from its grille, followed _very_ closely by two security service Holdens.

The red flag was a Tongan Royal Standard, and the car was evidently carrying one of the Tongan Royals to the bedside of King Taufa'ahau IV, who died late Sunday night.

Somehow, I've got a feeling that there won't be any supplements in the Brisbane newspapers telling us about the late King's 88 years on earth.

It turned out to be a decent 16-hour shift, anyway, with a total of $687 being added to the meter.

The second last fare for the shift was a pilot heading from his hotel in the city to the international airport terminal. He was flying an airliner chartered by the Australian government, taking troops to East Timor.

Just another quiet, and relatively secretive, deployment of Australian troops overseas -- another sign of the worrying secrecy that's infested the country in the last five years.