Saved
Monday night in the City was one of those nights when you look at the thousands of empty cabs and wonder, how do these guys make money? Yep, cabbies also consider the same question.
My only hope was to join an office rank and endure the long waits for that rare, meaty job. A fate chance, I thought, until the 10pm radio news gave me a break: “...the main award is still to be announced at the APRA music awards in Sydney tonight.” Kaching !
I hurriedly contacted a mate in the music industry and learned the awards were being held at the swish Hilton Hotel. For the next hour and a half I had a party while hundreds of empty cabs cruised past the joint, completely unaware of the 500 plus guests slowly departing. This is how my shift was rescued...
Entering the Hilton drive-thru lobby I found it devoid of waiting cabs. A few party types were hanging around, including Richard Clapton scurrying back inside like an errant school boy caught smoking.
Almost immediately a tall, striking blonde swept out and into the cab. She said, “Sweetie, I’ll give you twenty bucks to take me down to Ivy.” Twenty bucks for a $4 fare, no worries, pet. Although not an awards guest she was escaping the joint because “all those rock stars are on my level and partying. So I decided to meet a few friends.”
Upon returning there were still no cabs in the lobby and the next fare was a middle-aged bloke to the Eastern Suburbs. As a marketing executive for one of the major music labels he proved an informative passenger. “Yes, pirating is a big concern,” he conceded, “and we accept that as a fact of life. But thankfully there’s a hell of a lot of people who still consider illegal downloading as unethical and so buy their music.”
He revealed that the future for the labels included tie-ups with telecommunication carriers to onsell music through their platforms. “Although it’s pretty hard to swallow knowing that overnight the carriers could produce a list of the top 100 illegal downloaders. But they sell them bandwidth so we just have to live with that.”
Returning to the city I collected three edgy looking blokes off the street, heading to the Sofitel Hotel. “That George Lucas is going down,” one stated. “His wife spilled a drink over me in Miami.” They were international artists exhibiting at the Sydney Biennale.
By now it was after 11pm and once again I arrived to find the Hilton lobby blissfully empty of cabs. An impressive fella with chopped blonde hair intercepted an older bloke about to climb aboard. The blonde was Daniel Johns, the subject of the following conversation with a female passenger travelling to the northern beaches...
- ME: How diplomatic of you!
- PASS: I don’t know what he was on but his acceptance speech was a shambles.
- ME: Did he mention ‘God’ a lot?
- PASS: On the contrary, it was peppered with vulgarities.
- ME: What a rock star, did he say ‘fuck’ a lot?
- PASS: Yep, but that’s not all...
- ME: Oh, he used the ‘c’ word..?
- PASS: Uh huh.
- ME: ...in an acceptance speech..!?
- PASS: Yes, unfortunately.
- ME: What a moron.
After which I headed home, early, thanks to a simple text message - 'The Hilton'.
Posted in On the job | Comments (4)
