Had to go to Sydney over the weekend for a business meeting, and made the mistake of taking a 9 pm flight out on Friday nite. Well, I had wanted to have dinner at home and spend a bit more time with Siyuan and wife before heading out. In typical Melbourne-Sydney fashion, the landing was delayed and by the time the plane landed, it was closer to 11 p.m., than the 10:20 p.m. scheduled landing time. The taxi queue was long, to say the least. But it had looked manageable with staff controlling the queue. Sure, the taxis came in spurts and we might have to wait a while, but at least there was order. This was a crowd of businessmen, holiday-goers returning home, some teenagers, retirees and families. Nobody seem drunk or on drugs. At 11 p.m., the queue controllers (for want of a better phrase) went home. A fellow directed a cab heading his way to a more deserving passenger ahead of him in the queue, and civility seems to prevail. 2 minutes later, he changed his mind, and he jumped in front of the road and stopped a cab heading to the front of the queue. He jumped in and forced the cab to drive off despite protests. You could hear the thoughts that went through all the minds - its everybody for themselves.
An Asian cab driver asked if there were other passengers heading the same way as his existing passenger. He was told off (for unknown reasons) by a man in his 40s, looking serious in his suit and suitcase (strangely, or perhaps not strangely, when two other cab drivers did the same thing a minute later, there were no protests.)
The tension in the crowd snapped, and people began to curse and swear. And some at the front ran for the cabs.
At that point I was already at the front of the queue, and then got shoved further down the road...where I managed to get a cab because it became rather chaotic up front. Lucky, I guess. In the cab, the driver told me that long queues past 11 was a common problem. I wonder if the ugly scenes were just as common then?
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