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.

Sleepy. Eggs.

Hassles with the Blogger Beta and my computer have thrown me off this blog since November.

Christmas was quiet, as was New Year's Eve, in Brisbane's taxis.

January and February were both incredibly quiet, so I've been doing some weekday shifts to get a few more quid together to pay for car repairs (my 30-year-old LandCruiser's floor had rusted out) and a trip to Sydney this weekend for the annual Freelancer's Convention.

Got started late (3pm) for the weekend single last Saturday, and had taken about $180 by 10pm, when a hail in Ann Street took me to the corner of my own street -- a rarity, in which you get paid to actually go home.

As things were still quiet (Friday and Saturday nights don't get busy for taxis in Brisbane until midnight, when there's a brief, 3-hour busy spurt until "lock-in" time for the nightclubs), and, as I was a bit tired, I went home for a couple of hours' sleep to catch the busy time after midnight.

I planned to wake up at midnight, or just after.

I woke up at 4am, and missed the whole bloody thing.

So it turned out to be a long Sunday for this little black duck -- a Sunday that started at 4.30am and didn't finish until 2am Monday. $640 on the meter for Sunday, however, was the good news.

And, luckily. no dickheads in the taxi.

Got a brand-new taxi for Monday night. Only 45,000km on the odometer, and it's first-ever shift as a taxi.

But the hail light didn't work.

And the meter -- a "Cabcharge" brand meter (which *all* taxis are going to have to get, due to a Federal Government decision -- was a type I've never used before. It made for an entertaining night.

And the taxi got christened.

The passenger (and her dog) came from Boondall, and the dog was old and sick. The veterinary surgery was at West Chermside -- a $22 taxi fare away -- and the route between Boondall and West Chermside took us down Maundrell Terrace and past the John Goss Reserve (a dark patch of parkland beside the road).

An egg hitting the windscreen at 60km/h makes quite a noise. We were lucky that it wasn't a rock.

They're cheaper ?

Well, not really.

I spent a few years driving a maxi-taxi (a minibus converted to carry wheelchairs), and still occasionally drive one. On taxi ranks -- especially at night -- these eight-foot-tall, 20-foot-long taxis can be invisible as people walk straight past them and get into the sedan that's ranked behind them.

I was second on the Albert Street rank, right behind a maxi, last night when a young Malay Chinese student walked straight past the maxi and got into my cab. I thought about sending her up to the maxi, but it had been a quiet night and it was 40 minutes since my last passenger, so I decided to take her to her Kangaroo Point destination instead (just over a $10 fare).

But I had to say this when we got to Kangaroo Point:

"I saw you walked past the maxi back in the city."

"Yes" (she said).

"Do you know they're cheaper than sedans?"

"Huh?"

"Yeah, their meters run a little bit slower, and you'd have saved about 50 cents on this trip."

All bullshit, of course, but she wasn't to know that.

I reckon she'll look for the maxi-taxis on the rank next time. :)

Optimist

Ann Street in Fortitude Valley is one of the inner-city's busiest streets, no matter what time is on the clock.

As it passes through the middle of Brisbane's nightclub district, the more alarming times for driving down Ann Street are late on Friday and Saturday nights as the city's bright young things flit like moths between the strobe nightclub lights on either side of Ann Street.

The traffic -- ranging from motor scooters to 60-tonne trucks -- doesn't matter in the slightest to them as they wander across the road like Browns' Cows in their trendy black clobber at the street's darkest spots.

I'd just dropped a mob off at the Empire Hotel, right in the middle of the Valley, and was bailing back to the CBD when Oliver the Optimist frantically waved me down at 11.30pm.

A fare's a fare, and thinking he'd be in the cab quickly, I reefed the cab across to the kerb and whacked the hazard lights on. This part of Ann Street is the beginning of the on-ramp for the Story Bridge, but hell, the cab would only be stopped for a couple of seconds.

Or so I thought.

"I don't want a cab," Olly said as he opened the back door, "I'm just looking for the phone I left behind in it -- oh, you're not the cab I caught."

Yep, at 11.30 on a Friday night, this bright spark decided that the best way of retrieving the mobile phone he'd just left behind in one of Brisbane's 1,800 taxis was just to stand in the city's busiest street and hail every passing taxi until he eventually found the cab with his phone in the back.

He's probably still there.

Elsewhere on Friday night, a budding young Schumacher's weekend took a rapid turn for the worse in Logan Road when he panicked on approaching an intersection.

It was about 9pm, and our Juan Manuel was roaring up Logan Road in Woolloongabba in his Mitsubishi Cordia at about 180km/h -- an impressive feat in an inner-city street with a 60km/h speed limit -- when something made him jump on the brakes as the car roared past Lewis Street.

The brakes locked, and the Mitsubishi skidded across the centre traffic island and down the wrong side of the road for 100 metres before skidding across the Deshon Street intersection and coming to a rest against the post supporting a set of traffic lights.

The traffic island didn't divert the car's course at all.

Although the car was only good for the scrapyard's crusher, the driver somehow managed to get out of it with barely a scratch.

As for the two policemen in the police car that was stopped at the red light, they must have thought Christmas had come early. They didn't even have to chase this bloke, after all. There he was, skidding virtually straight into their laps.

The skidmarks are still in Logan Road. All 120 metres (400 feet) of them.

Justice, for a change

It's not often that you get your money back from a fare evader. Normally, the poor mug cabbie is the one who's taken for a ride and left feeling like a mug.

Last week, I copped one such passenger. A young, drunk truckie who hailed the cab at Chapel Hill to take him home to Bellbowrie, on Brisbane's western outskirts -- a fare that ought to run to about $24 or so.

As we approach Bellbowrie, he tells me that he might have a bit of trouble paying the fare, so I started to reduce my potential loss by stopping the meter at $19.

At the shops, we went through a pantomime show of him trying to get money out of the ATM, only to have his card rejected -- then the same happened at the bottle shop and again at the taxi.

Now, at 9.30pm, the nearest open police station is Indooroopilly's -- about 10 miles away -- and I didn't particularly relish the prospect of driving that distance late at night with a drunk and increasingly angry truckie beside me. So I played the mug and took him home for free.

At his house, we went through the whole routine of him trying to pay the fare yet again. Either he was genuine or a bloody good actor: I found myself wanting to think he was genuine, so I gave him the company's address to send his cheque to pay the fare later in the week.

He got a week's grace, and eight days later (Saturday 4 November) I tootled down to the local police station.

Today, a rather perplexed admin officer from the taxi company rang me, to say the the young truckie's mum had sent them the money for the fare.

Methinks he'd got a visit from the local constabulary on Guy Fawkes' Day.

It's nice when things go right.

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.