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.