1 July 2003: the beginning of the financial year in Australia. So have you made your Financial New Year’s resolutions yet? Adam and Will, the breakfast crew on my local radio station put out a call for listeners to phone in with suggestions for possible financial new year’s resolutions.

This started me thinking. My resolutions might include cutting up my credit card and paying it off, starting up a high interest yielding savings account, and getting rid of the non performing stocks from my share portfolio (or, in other words, all of them).

Unfortunately for me, Adam and Will had less serious financial objectives in mind. Oh well, I have never had any luck getting through to radio shows by phone anyway, the lines are always jammed.

On the subject of the financial new year, I have been working late down in the city, these past few nights as a result of this auspicious occasion. It really hasn’t been all that bad though, stuck in a little cubicle as I have been.

The main reason being that winter has arrived with a blast in Sydney this week, and with the weather cool and wet, incarceration in an office cubicle has not been as rough as it usually would be.

Each night after work I have caught a taxi home, and have been interested by the variance in the fares. And this despite taking exactly the same route each time.

Usually after 9pm there is very little traffic on central Sydney streets, and there are seldom problems with being delayed on congested roads. Yet the taxi fare for my trip on Monday night was higher than my trip tonight, or last night, which were both exactly the same.

Why would that be, you ask? Well, I noticed that the taxi driver on Monday night was driving far slower than the drivers these last two evenings. Hmm, very sneaky indeed, drive slowly and rack up more dosh on the metre, huh?

And the profit for the driver as a result of this dastardly plan? One dollar! Well, don’t spend it all at once! Am I worried by any of this in the first place? A dollar here, a dollar there, hmm? No, of course not, the company I am working for is paying for the taxi trips anyway!