Transferable Skills

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Taxi driver | Committee leader | Private teacher| High school teacher

Choir conductor | Publisher | Home office / MYOB user

Musician | ASX trader | Computer user & tutor

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Page in progress [since I wrote this page I did another twelve months as a taxi driver, July 2006 to July 2007, this time as a day driver,

base operator and accounts receivables clerk for Premier Taxis Karratha, but that’s another story.]

Taxi driver

Driving a taxi gives provides great character building and I have learnt many things from it. For example, every night you are confronted with frustrations and disappointments coming at you from every conceivable direction, and then from some more angles you've never thought of. If you let all these difficulties get the better of you you simply can't drive a taxi.

The passengers are the most obvious challenge. Just like a counsellor you have to gauge how much, if at all, they want to talk, and how they want to talk. You have to be very careful to steer clear of subjects like politics and religion. In the drivers' course we were told never to talk about, um, er, what's that three-letter word again, begins with 's' and ends with 'x'? Mind you, there were occasions, only about once a week, when a passenger would quizz me all about being an androgyne. I was happy to oblige, but not in too much detail!

Everyone knows we get difficult passengers, I just wish we could tell in advance who the difficult ones were by their appearance. Some of the best passengers are scruffy, unshaven and in poor clothing, and some of the worst wear a suit and tie, or an evening dress. In any case a driver has to have certain well-defined reasons for refusing to take a passenger, and being scruffy, or an off-duty police detective, isn't one of them. From this I have learnt that you can't judge people by their looks at all. And some people are very nice when they're drunk. Communication skills and the ability to predict are paramount in dealing with difficult passengers, whether they be drunk, on drugs, aggravated, lost, confused, sick, or planning to 'do a runner.'

The problems with passengers are many and varied, they'd fill a book. One I found difficult at first was the way so many (in Perth)questioned our right to charge them. It sometimes seemed like two out of every three passengers wanted me to justify my right to charge the fare. A lot of positive self-talk was required to deal with this constant questioning of all aspects of the charging system and my entitlement to the opportunity to make a living.

Two other situations come a close second and third behind problems with passengers. They are: finding addresses (particularly at night), and no-jobs. Not having clear street numbering of houses and businesses should be an offence punishable by a term of imprisonment. And there are some really strange numberings. For example, there is a short street in Claremont with three number sixes. One is number six in that street, another is number six in the next street, and another is unit number six, but you can't tell it's a unit number. Every night I'd many times spend ten minutes at a time trying to find pick-up addresses that didn't seem to make sense for one reason or another in Perth. The two unusual but systematic numbering systems in Karratha would require a chapter all to themselves.

No-jobs are the bane of taxi drivers. We drive to the pick-up address, spend five or ten minutes trying to find the address or trying to find the passengers, but they've gone in a mate's car or walked or changed their minds and won't answer the door. No-jobs are worse on really busy nights and they are self-generating. We lose about twenty minutes on average for each one, resulting in the next passenger having to wait longer. The next passenger gets frustrated with waiting and calls a rival taxi company or gets in their mate's car, but doesn't cancel the taxi. So we rock up to the second passenger's place and they are not there either. And so it goes on, with the third passenger getting their taxi even later again.

Other less obvious hassles which must simply go right over your head include traffic congestion, other taxi drivers breaking the rules, problems with the on-board computer or the eftpos machine, mistakes by the base operator, having to wait a long time to talk to the query operator, getting stuck in a badly designed taxi rank where you can't exit until you're at the head of the queue (such as at Perth domestic airport), and slow times. I knew one driver who waited two hours at the airport and got a $10 fare; he was so angry he couldn't talk to the passengers. That problem, of course, was his own fault.

My two biggest fears in driving a taxi are 1) forgetting to put the meter on, and 2) neurological (nerve) damage. By the latter I mean damage to the vehicle, because I will feel it in the hip pocket nerve sooner or later (the insurance excess is $500 or $600). Minor assaults don't rate because I choose not to think about them, I choose not to live in fear, I choose not to be paranoid.

Obviously, you must be customer focused otherwise you're really going to have trouble with your passengers, but that is a skill I already had from my many years of private teaching. One of the biggest lessons for me in taxi driving has been about other aspects of attitude. You must have a 'go go' attitude and you mustn't let problems get to you or else you won't make a living, at least in Perth. For example, I remember a Friday night when I'd been driving about six months. A more experienced driver had six no-jobs in the first two hours after which he was so disheartened that he made only about half his usual Friday profit. I had a few no-jobs too, three I think, but I didn't let it get to me. My profit was a personal record.

Virtually all taxi drivers in Western Australia are self-employed, whether they own the taxi or not. Because of this you have to be very enterprising, especially in Perth where you won't make a living unless you have your wits about you. It was like playing a twelve-hour game of Monopoly. There were lots of rules, a definite time limit (you could be fined $2 per minute if you brought the car back late at the end of your shift), and lots of quick decisions to be made. You had to weigh up the probabilities and consider the hidden costs. For example, if you don't have a nap in the middle of your shift will it mean you'll have to stop early due to being sleepy, just when all the revellers in Northbridge are wanting to head home? At the beginning, should you head to the rank at the Parmelia Hilton hotel in the CBD and get a city worker going home to Booragoon for $35, or head off to Fremantle knowing that there is a big football game finishing soon? In Fremantle you'll get lots of local, small fares, but you won't be idle. If you get a fare to Booragoon at that time of day you'll <probably> have to drive all the way back to the CBD empty. And you may not be able to get on the city rank in the first place. These are only some of the considerations, there are no consistently correct choices.

I developed a keen appreciation of strategic planning from these kinds of choices. I'm not about to reveal my most important regular strategies, but I'll give you an example of thinking on your feet: a $120 fare from Belmont to Mandurah, the only time I've driven a taxi there. Perth taxis can deliver a passenger to Mandurah but we can't pick up a new fare once we're there, so I drove back empty as far as Rockingham (about half way back to Perth). I then spent about five hours constantly going up and down Read Street, making a huge profit because I was one of only a handful of taxis in the area and it was a Saturday night. Eventually, an hour before the end of my shift and just in the nick of time a passenger took me all the way back to Fremantle. The Mandurah fare was not of my planning, of course, but the decision to go to Rockingham was entirely my own, whereas many drivers would have simply driven all the way back to Fremantle or Perth empty and been sorely disappointed at the great loss of time. My decision to go to Rockingham, as always a bit of a calculated risk, resulted in a very good profit that night. Being in the right place at the right time has little to do with luck and everything to do with making the right choices.

As a Perth driver I probably didn't make as much profit on the really busy Friday and Saturday nights as some other drivers, but I know I did consistently better on the slow nights. On the busy nights some drivers would not have a nap (I would sleep 20 or 30 minutes in the car), and some drivers would speed a lot, some would cheat (there are ways), and some would have a more ruthless attitude to making a buck (for example by illegally refusing passengers who wanted to go too far away from the CBD, resulting in a lower standard of customer service). In contrast, I wanted to make my taxi driving sustainable. This meant I had to find ways of enjoying it,feeling good about it, and pacing myself in terms of sleep and concentration. It was like the story of the hare and the tortoise, so that over a whole week I was doing very well in terms of profit because I did well on the slow nights.

To keep the job interesting I would actively seek out fares going to far-flung areas of the Perth metropolitan area (our 'control' area). I even kept brief notes in a computer spreadsheet about jobs that went to places like Sawyers Valley, Pickering Brook, Baskerville, or Wungong. Many times I'd take a 'cover job' where I'd drive 20 or 30 minutes, say from Burswood to Mundaring, to pick up a passenger. There was often only a fifty per cent chance they'd be there, otherwise I'd find rabbits instead, but it was a nice drive into the hills (where I grew up). Or I'd take a passenger in desperate need who perhaps didn't have the fare or had been waiting on the other side of Perth for hours to visit their sick mother in hospital. Those fares made you feel like you were really providing a useful public service.

On the slow nights I had to use all my strategies and tactics to make a profit. A 'never-say-die' attitude was a major factor, but so was the ability to constantly weigh up the probabilities and take chances. My choices usually paid off.

Something that many self-employed people and small business operators have in common is the inability or the disinclination to 'do the figures'. In my previous occupation as a musician and music teacher for 25 years I was guilty of this shortcoming and I have met many others who are also good at making something or providing a service (such as teaching) but have no business skills whatsoever. As a taxi driver I have rectified this deficiency but I suspect many other taxi drivers have not. So, being very good with my bookkeeping, and analysing the figures, are two more things I have learnt from driving a taxi. I keep meticulous financial records on a spreadsheet (and also in MYOB) and occasionally extract statistics and graph them. In this fashion I have been able to identify which taxi shifts are best for me and have been able to anticipate fluctuations in the demand for taxis. I can state absolutely what my average weekly income has been for various periods and for Perth and Karratha. I doubt that many other taxi drivers have such reliable figures. When they talk about their earnings methinks they're using some vague memories and a measure of wishful thinking instead of hard facts. In fact, I know some of them do. You can only run a successful business by frequently looking at the facts, but many taxi drivers don't seem to understand that they are running a business.

And, like any business people, taxi drivers in Perth must compete vigorously but within well-established rules, something I relished and something I miss in Karratha.

I could write a book about taxi driving, but I'll stop here. You've got the drift about some of the many things it has taught me in the year and a half since I began driving in December 2004. I've enjoyed the many challenges of taxi driving but it is now time to move on to something completely different, perhaps something less sedentary? Or which takes me out of the urban areas?

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Page in progress....could write a great deal here about other work I've done....might take quite a while....

On second thoughts, maybe I'll just leave it at that for the time being.

June 2006.

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