This is the tenth in a series of posts relaying conversations I have had with taxi drivers. The first of these posts appeared on 6 June 2018.
21 October
Caught a cab from home to Broadway. The driver’s name – which I saw in the SMS the taxi company sent to me as the car approached my building – was Jewel, and he arrived at the front shortly after I made the call. He was possibly from South America (I didn’t ask), and he didn’t talk bar the bare minimum needed to complete the steps required for the transaction. I told him to go to Broadway at the corner of Harris Street and he said nothing. He signalled left at the end of my street and then silently turned the wheel. At the next intersection he turned right and made his way east.
The radio in Jewel’s car was tuned to 2GB (owned by a company called Macquarie Radio which is, itself, owned by the company that owns my favourite newspaper). Shock jock Ray Hadley was talking quietly – his distinctive voice coming through the speakers into the cabin Jewel and I shared – for most of the trip down Harris Street.
Hadley at one point gave a stock market report and then segued straight into an ad, delivered with his own voice, for travel to Japan, emblematising the way that Capital seamlessly inserts itself into all parts of our lives, even to the point of blandly eliding the interstices between things with its inane patter. In a similar way, the state government allows companies to erect massive billboards, some of which these days are video displays, on busy motorways. The danger being, one supposes, that we shall for an instant be able to escape from the moronic blandishments of the advertising industry and its optimistic customers.
The only place that appears to be free of this kind of pollution is the sky but, even then, skywriting can enter into the frame, as happened in September in the lead-up to a football game. Perhaps, one day, a company shall lift a huge stencil into the sky and position it so that the face of the moon shines through a corporate logo, in a way similar to how a bat signal is projected onto clouds, using a spotlight, by the authorities in the fictional Gotham when trouble visits their city.
The driver and I arrived at the headquarters of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC; it is publicly funded through taxes). I had asked to be let out of the car here because it is safe to exit cabs at this point, on the building’s forecourt, away from the traffic. Then I said I wanted to pay for the trip using EFTPOS. Without making a remark he picked up the enabling machine; it had been sitting on the centre console among a range of other objects.
He silently punched some buttons on its screen and then, hardly moving his lips, softly muttered, “There you go,” proffering the device to me with his left hand. I took my bank’s transaction card out of my wallet, which had already come out of my pocket, and held the card against the device’s display until the device gave a single beep. I then waited a few beats before uttering, “Is that good?” while putting as much emotion into the words as I could in the hope of eliciting a smile or, indeed, any sign that I was more than just a means of earning money. Jewel said, after a pause, during which time he watched at the EFTPOS machine’s screen, “Yeah.” “Ok, thanks then,” I said, got out of the car, and closed the door. He drove off into the traffic and I walked up the slight incline toward my destination.
21 October
Caught a cab from home to Broadway. The driver’s name – which I saw in the SMS the taxi company sent to me as the car approached my building – was Jewel, and he arrived at the front shortly after I made the call. He was possibly from South America (I didn’t ask), and he didn’t talk bar the bare minimum needed to complete the steps required for the transaction. I told him to go to Broadway at the corner of Harris Street and he said nothing. He signalled left at the end of my street and then silently turned the wheel. At the next intersection he turned right and made his way east.
The radio in Jewel’s car was tuned to 2GB (owned by a company called Macquarie Radio which is, itself, owned by the company that owns my favourite newspaper). Shock jock Ray Hadley was talking quietly – his distinctive voice coming through the speakers into the cabin Jewel and I shared – for most of the trip down Harris Street.
Hadley at one point gave a stock market report and then segued straight into an ad, delivered with his own voice, for travel to Japan, emblematising the way that Capital seamlessly inserts itself into all parts of our lives, even to the point of blandly eliding the interstices between things with its inane patter. In a similar way, the state government allows companies to erect massive billboards, some of which these days are video displays, on busy motorways. The danger being, one supposes, that we shall for an instant be able to escape from the moronic blandishments of the advertising industry and its optimistic customers.
The only place that appears to be free of this kind of pollution is the sky but, even then, skywriting can enter into the frame, as happened in September in the lead-up to a football game. Perhaps, one day, a company shall lift a huge stencil into the sky and position it so that the face of the moon shines through a corporate logo, in a way similar to how a bat signal is projected onto clouds, using a spotlight, by the authorities in the fictional Gotham when trouble visits their city.
The driver and I arrived at the headquarters of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC; it is publicly funded through taxes). I had asked to be let out of the car here because it is safe to exit cabs at this point, on the building’s forecourt, away from the traffic. Then I said I wanted to pay for the trip using EFTPOS. Without making a remark he picked up the enabling machine; it had been sitting on the centre console among a range of other objects.
He silently punched some buttons on its screen and then, hardly moving his lips, softly muttered, “There you go,” proffering the device to me with his left hand. I took my bank’s transaction card out of my wallet, which had already come out of my pocket, and held the card against the device’s display until the device gave a single beep. I then waited a few beats before uttering, “Is that good?” while putting as much emotion into the words as I could in the hope of eliciting a smile or, indeed, any sign that I was more than just a means of earning money. Jewel said, after a pause, during which time he watched at the EFTPOS machine’s screen, “Yeah.” “Ok, thanks then,” I said, got out of the car, and closed the door. He drove off into the traffic and I walked up the slight incline toward my destination.
No comments:
Post a Comment