Karma

New York, so the song goes, is the city that never sleeps.

Brisbane, however, is the city that never quite gets around to waking up.

So it was a typically quiet Sunday night when I sat, half-asleep, on the Spring Hill rank when a radio job came through to my taxi.

Mr Hill was waiting for me, standing outside a block of flats / town-house complex / apartment block (delete whichever term you wish -- some sound more posh, but they all describe the same thing) just around the corner in Boundary Street.

Start the car. Take the first right, then right again and head up to the traffic lights, where I turned left and went to the bottom of the hill to park and wait while Mr Hill gave his girlfriend a long, lingering and fond farewell.

It's nearly 2am, and he wants to go to a cafe at Kangaroo Point, 3.1km away.

He seemed like a nice chap, until, that is, we got to a spot a few hundred metres away from his destination and he gave me $11 for the trip.

I stopped the meter early as a result.

$11.80.

Mr Hill then went through a Jekyll-and-Hyde transformation when he saw the 80 cents he didn't expect.

He doesn't have a car, he said, and he took this trip in taxis every night.

And it was never more than $11.

He slammed the door with a force that probably echoed off Mount Coot-tha, 8km away, and yelled that I was an avaricious female platypus (the actual language was substantially cruder, but the avaricious monotreme angle was what he was getting at) before storming off to his home in a side-street.

Many other taxi drivers in Brisbane aren't as long-tempered as I, so I asked the dispatchers to put a warning in the system for them if they got Mr Hill in their cabs.

And that was the end of it, until I got a message on my computer an hour later.

Mr Hill had left his wallet behind in the taxi, and there was a mobile phone number provided for me to phone to arrange return.

Now, tempting as it was to phone him and say that I was now on the other side of Caboolture and it would be about $85 to take the parcel (i.e. his wallet) back to him, another course turned out to be more attractive.

Every Monday morning, the Royal Brunei flight from Bandar Seri Begawan arrives in Brisbane at about 3.30am -- and the taxi company's headquarters is also out at the airport.

As Mr Hill doesn't have a car, he'd have to get a taxi to the airport during business hours to get his lost property back -- a $35 cab fare each way from Kangaroo Point and needing time off work.

And that, I thought, was really the end of the story, until I got a phone call from the cab company on Tuesday.

Mr Hill's girlfriend had phoned that morning, and she was furious.

Her boyfriend had come around to see her on Monday night, and at the end of his visit they phoned for a taxi to take him home.

But it turned out that the dispatchers had done a bit more than post a warning about him to other drivers.

Instead, they blacklisted him.

There was no way they were going to send him a taxi.

Oh well, it was no great loss.

Taximeters in Brisbane run at $1.68 per kilometre, so they'll run up $5.20 on a 3.1km trip.

After midnight on 364 days of the year, the flagfall is $5.80.

And if you ring up and book a taxi, you have to pay an extra fee to pay for the taxi to come from where it was to where you are (something that's been the case since at least the 1950s) -- at the moment, that fee's $1.10.

So it doesn't take a genius to figure out why Mr Hill had never paid more than eleven bucks for his taxi before -- he never bothered waiting for the taxi he'd booked to turn up, instead just hailing the first vacant hack that drove by.