 |
| Too Busy Looking for a House Number to Notice the Customer |
It is said that when life hands you lemons you should make lemonade. Life has handed me so many it's a wonder that I don't look like a Pucker Fish.But it all balances out. My life started out very nicely thank you. I was born into a well-to-do family in a beautiful setting on Pittwater north of Sydney. From the moment I was able to perceive, I fell in love with my surroundings. Unfortunately you need to physically own something in order to keep it. My parents owned the place and sold it to retire when I was thirty, married and had moved elsewhere.
I think it's rather a shame that an adult child doesn't get part ownership of parental property, the way spouses do. That would sure keep the population down, wouldn't it? But I had no say in the matter and all my protestations moved my parents not at all. I should have learned from experience. My parents had ignored every protestation I ever made so why change then?
Had I been able to keep the property I would now be worth a fortune. Well, that's not entirely true. I would have been sitting on a fortune and working to try and earn enough to eat. My mistake was not marrying for money. The trouble is I still couldn't bring myself to do such a thing unless the man was all I dreamed of and, rather importantly, he felt the same about me so that he proposed.
It is also a bit hard to get well-to-do men to take you seriously when you drive a cab for a living no matter how good you look. They seem to think I'm good for a date and an easy lay. I have dated a couple of men I've met through my job but they soon discover that I'm not easy. I am also amazed that men of a certain age think that you will date them even though they look like the rear end of a fat bull.
Men are attracted to good looking women, any women in fact, but they don't have the slightest inclination to lose weight or wear shoes instead of joggers to dinner and make themselves attractive to us. Some men must think that women go blind after forty just like men go deaf.
I find it extremely irksome and convenient for them that most men start to go deaf in middle age. I'm sure it's a deliberate genetic ploy by nature. It's bad enough that men don't listen until you say something three times, by which time they decide that the annoying noise they won't tune into is nagging. Then, just to add insult to injury, they go deaf.
I've also discovered that if men think you have no money, they want nothing to do with you. Most are divorced and have already suffered from STD (Sexually Transmitted Debt) and don't want to again. Perversely, however, there are men who go on the Internet and seek Russian or Asian brides with the whole idea of having the woman financially dependent on them.
They choose such women for two reasons. They are misguided enough to think that women from certain cultures are more pliant and willing to please a man and also it will be hard for them to survive or leave if they want a divorce. Women who are older, single and local are overlooked in favour of foreign, younger brides but I'd want nothing to do with such a man any more than he'd want anything to do with me.
So how did I end up driving a cab when I started off so well and thought such a job was somewhere at the bottom of the food chain? I keep wondering that myself when I'd made all the right moves. My mother, with whom I finally got on beautifully in the last seven years of her life said to me: "You're unlucky."
I have to say it is one thing we agreed on. It makes no sense, but then luck doesn't make sense. We had been discussing how my life had turned out in spite of all the effort I had put in. How I'm a clever and decent person who didn't cause bad things to happen out of ignorance or unkindness and how things not only didn't go well, they went awry.
When I left school I spent two and a half years at University studying Science and then suddenly dropped my bundle and dropped out. There was good reason. I had survived boarding school suffering severe Obsessive Compulsive and Panic Disorder. I am very clever but could not concentrate on my studies. I winged through and matriculated simply because I could swat in a matter of weeks and was terrified that if I failed a year, that would mean I'd stay longer in school. The teachers advised my mother to take me out. She didn't listen.
After leaving University I had to do something for a living as my parents couldn't understand the need for me to stop and repair by sitting around the house watching midday matinees on television, so I was bundled off to do a short Computer course. I became a Programmer for one year and decided that if this was living, I didn't much care for it. The fact is I needed a break.
My boyfriend of four years, whom I had met at University, finally convinced me to marry him and it was in the next five years, when we moved around the country for his work, that I was able to repair. It wasn't easy for him at all or on our marriage, but it gave me healing space. I owe him greatly for this time. After we had our son when we lived in Perth, the final cathartic step to gain my sanity was moving to Hong Kong for three years for my husband's job. I loved the place so much it simply took over my mind and my spirit and I became strong.
Unfortunately Hong Kong didn't have the same effect on my husband. Also, in finally flying free of my past, I let my hair down a tad too much and hurt him. Wounded but wiser we moved back to Australia where I tried to make it up. Sadly he never forgave me and we remained in Perth, a place I detested, for seven years. In the end I was beginning to fall apart. If there is one thing you don't do to someone who has suffered panic disorder and got over it, as well as been trapped in a boarding school they hate, it is to tie them down where they don't want to be.
Panic disorder means it is hard to go out anywhere without being overwhelmed and beginning to panic. I had tied myself down and had then broken free. Now I was being tied down and I believe it was punishment. I decided to undertake a degree at this stage because I felt I would soon need to support myself. I had been doing odd jobs wherever we had traveled and I was able to find work, but I wanted a career.
Our son was still in primary school and I didn't want to take on too stressful a degree so that he would suffer or that would cause me to drop out again. I had a habit of taking on a course and dropping out since my first time at University. I could see what my brain was up to. I was re-dropping my bundle by habit. I wasn't going to let it get away with that just as I had beaten OCD and panic. This time I would go the distance.
I chose to do an Arts degree majoring in Communications and Media. This was a practical degree that would give me employment opportunities. I completed it at the same time my husband decided to take a job in Brisbane. What could be better? I was out of Perth at last and qualified although without experience.
Over the preceding years I had picked up enough secretarial and computer skills to make me proficient. It was just as well. For the next four years I applied for roles allied to my degree. I had three interviews in all that time. It wasn't as easy then either. Email was just in it's infancy. Every letter was typed and sent and then you had to wait for the reply by phone or mail.
My marriage broke up and I had to look for secretarial positions. Even the word had gone out of favour and was now an Administration Assistant, a Personal Assistant or an Executive Assistant. They were all the same duties but depended on the seniority of the person for whom you worked.
Firstly it was hard to get the work. On one occasion when I did land a role I worked beside a girl who had also just started. She was twenty and had arrived in Brisbane the day before. She said she could always get a temporary job the moment she applied anywhere. I smelt a rat. I was now forty but looked very young for my age. Could it be possible there was age discrimination out there?
This is where it gets weird. My roles were sporadic to say the least. I had to go to Centrelink to obtain unemployment benefits when I was out of work. My husband still helped but it wasn't enough. Apart from the jobs being few and far between I appeared to be jinxed as, without exaggeration, I was figuratively knifed in the back in every office job I did.
I was amenable, hard working and enthusiastic but there is a lemon in every office and something about me cheeses them off. Some of them were covert while others were outright poisonous. I was always the new person in the role and would be turfed out at the end of three months. No one seemed to care that I relied on my job for financial support. No, humanity doesn't come into it with these types. All they cared about was the invisible threat I somehow posed.
My partner, whom I met after my husband and I split up, had driven taxis and wanted me to lease one so he could help support us. My husband and parents had helped me buy a house after the divorce and when I decided to move, I sold it with a view to buying elsewhere. It was far from paid off so I only had so much capital. Meantime we bought a car and leased the taxi plate with all associated costs that included yearly registration, insurance and maintenance. Let it be understood that taxi registration is ten times the amount of car registration as is the insurance.
I never did get another house. The lease went into debt and I had to get a cab licence so I could drive and help reduce it. Meantime I lived on what capital I had left until there wasn't any. I also spent a lot flying to Sydney to visit my mother where she lived in a nursing home.
I was at first humiliated to be driving a cab but gradually I felt a lot safer than I did working with vipers in an office. My garrulous nature also had an outlet at last. My first customers were groups of school children whose taxi fares were subsidized by the Government as they suffered conditions such as Asperger's Syndrome, Autism and in some cases severe depression.
The group of older primary school boys I drove regularly helped me in their own way to deal with my new job. They were terrific and we got on wonderfully as a group. After a year of driving them as well as other customers, I tried office work again. You know what happened of course so I went back to driving cabs. Our cab lease was finished and I took my courage in hand and went to a depot and signed on.
I started with two days a week, all that was available, and worked up to five and being a regular. I'm no longer feeling ashamed. Now I love this job. I also feel like I have a workplace and belong to the group at the depot. It's a great feeling to be accepted in a workplace at last. Of course I'm a bit of an oddity. Female drivers are about as scarce as Dodo's but that makes us feel unique, and appreciated.
One thing I've discovered is that people treat you the way you feel about yourself. I'm respected for what I do and I find women passengers to be the best, the opposite of how it works in an office. Women appreciate having a woman driver. Young women want to hire me to drive them at night, but I only drive in the day. I'm not brave enough to deal with drunks and the other types who come out at night.
At least twice a day I'm asked what a woman like me is doing driving a cab. I feel like an endless, repeating tape recording, so now I'm writing it down. I did try office work again a couple of years ago and hated being cooped up indoors. I also worked with possibly the worst of the backstabbers I had endured. She was a witch from hell. She set me up, she lied to the manager, she half filled me in on what to do and loathed the fact that I enjoyed what I did.
It took every ounce of my self control to not let all the tyres on her car down when I left. I still wish I hadn't shown such restraint. At any rate I decided I was too old to put up with people like her. I also decided she was her own worst karma and would make her own life miserable. As such, revenge was irrelevant.
I also believe that whatever you do, you should take pride in it and do it well. The same applies to cab driving. A ride in a cab should be a pleasure and if you are foreign to a place, you should be able to trust the driver to know exactly how to get you to your destination the shortest way possible.
Lately this isn't usually the case given the number of overseas students driving cabs for some extra money. Many don't care about customer service, often don't know how to get to a place and some just plain cheat. It makes it harder for me to take pride in something that I found hard to accept doing in the first place.
I won't finance my old age doing this job, given my finances, but at least I'm independent and not relying on social security. Who knows what the future holds anyway? It's one ride where you don't know exactly where you're heading. I really wouldn't want to know anyway.
END.
No comments:
Post a Comment