Taxi!

Hi Everyone, terribly sorry that this posting is so late. I had a lot of catching up to do when I got back from Sydney and I’m only just finding a bit of time to post this week’s blog entry. Can you believe its already April??? During March we hit another record of 1342 visitors to the site. Great stuff!

Now last week as I mentioned I was in Sydney for the Membership Lifecycle Board meeting for the Australian Computer Society and it was a great experience meeting such a high calibre of board members including the CIO of CSC Stephen Kowal and the new CEO of the ACS (yes we like our acronyms!) Kim Denham. The meeting went well but I decided that Sydney really wasn’t my kind of city.

For example, I went to a shopping centre that was supposidley near my hotel. It was about a 20 minute walk away and when I finally found the place, it took me another 20 minutes to walk all around the outside to work out how to get into the place. In the end, I ended up going in through a fire escape door. So frustrating!!!

While I was in Sydney I travelled around by taxi and I made use of the time between places to talk to the cab drivers and I had some really great conversations with them.

The first trip was from the airport to the hotel and my driver was from Bangladesh. He’d been living in Sydney for 10 years and driving cabs most of that time. He has a family and is proud of his children growing up in Australia. We spoke about the changes that the Rudd government were proposing and how did he feel about them. He voted for Rudd and believes that he’ll do a great job and take the country to a new level. I asked him if he had any plans for retirement and he said that he wanted to open up a restaurant but didn’t know the first thing about the business side of things even though he could cook some great food. I suggested he watched Gordon Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares and learn the business behind running a restaurant. I hope it all works out for him because I’ve never actually been to a Bangladeshi restaurant and I’m sure I would cherish the experience!

My second trip by cab was from my hotel to my cousin’s place for dinner. My driver was a little reserved but when I found out he was from Singapore, I mentioned how I used to go there every year as a kid on my way to Sri Lanka and we started to share stories about the local hotspots over there. Turns out that he’s been living in Sydney for 30 years. He’s seen quite a lot during that time and in his own words he’s seen Sydney “grow up”. Interesting way to look at it as we don’t often think of cities having biological characteristics. He has a family in Sydney and doesn’t think he could live anywhere else in the world. He’s excited about the changes that the government is proposing but feels as though they would need to do more for education in order to really bring Australia to the world stage in business competition. He was a great guy and I enjoyed chatting with him.

My last cab trip was from the hotel back to the airport and my driver this time was from India. Again we shared stories about our cultures and spoke about the governments proposed changes and how he felt about them. Again another fan of the Rudd Government who’d been living in Sydney for 10 years and was looking forward to the changes. He has a family in Sydney and only drives taxis on Sundays while the other days he drives buses. As we continued to talk it came out that he liked doing community development activities to give something back to the city that has welcomed him and his family. His aim upon retirement is to create a charity organisation that will help those less fortunate than him and perhaps assist to give kids a better education through scholarships. What a great idea! He also said that charity first begins at the home and then expands from there - which is very true. The topic then switched over to his Son and he explained that he was quite frustrated with him. He’s only 16 years old and sits infront of his computer all day long and doesn’t get any exercise. As a result his son is close to 100kg which is DEFINITELY not a good thing. He has tried everything to convince his son to lead a healthy lifestyle but unfortunately nothings worked so he’s given up. I hope things get better for him and his family soon as he seems like a great guy and I really would like to see his charity organisation established one day to help others.

Three amazing conversations with three great people and I found the experience quite interesting. Living in Darwin, everything is close by so those of us who catch cabs don’t really have the time to talk to cab drivers at length which is a real shame because I’m sure they could have some great stories to share.

Speaking of stories, I’ve just told you about three great cab rides but I should point out that I always haven’t had the best times in a cab. Last year when I was in Perth my trip from the airport to my hotel was quite interesting but I was quite relieved to arrive at the hotel in once piece. My cab driver was a young indian guy who had some quite unique ideas about perth and life in general. When he rocked on up to pick me up he didn’t get out of the cab to help me with my bags (a big mistake on customer service!) and when I hopped into the cabin with him he had all these shopping bags in there. In an attempt to start a conversation I asked him if he’d been shopping. He said “no…these are my gadgets.” and then while he was driving reached down into the bags and started pulling out all these electronic devices. Now fair enough if he pulled out a cd player or a mobile phone handsfree kit but this guy pulled out an ipod, 2 GPS trackers, a handheld tv, and a radar detector - which constantly kept beeping everytime we passed a cop car. I’m not sure which impressed me the most, the amount of electronic devices in the cab, or the manner in which he was driving and setting up the gadgets at the same time! He played some hindi songs quite loud and proceeded to sing along to the chorus of each one even though it was clear that his talents lied elsewhere. In between verses he complained constantly about the government and how Australia was so backward in everything but his master plan was to become a professional university student and milk the system. Charming!

So as you can see you win some, and you lose some.

Dream, Build, Inspire, Lead!

AJ~

p.s. The NT Young Achiever of the Year awards are on tonight so wish me luck! Stay tunned to find out how I did…

Author: AJ Kulatunga

Category:

Inspire, ACS, Sydney, Taxi