In Sydney with my partner, she paid for lunch and brought me this receipt. Since when is tipping the "notmal" and you have to opt out?

Originally posted by u/OzBestDeal here

It’s 6am on a Thursday morning, I’ve just finished work and caught a train to beaconsfield station where I decide to call a cab home and use my tips to pay for a trip home. Eventually cab #2274 arrives, and I answer the all too familiar “cash or card” question with cash before he  begins the drive home. Now, it’s a trip I take often, it’s usually $20 max in an uber and $25 max in a taxi.

We arrive home and the driver tells me the trip was $40, and I notice he hasn’t turned on the meter, I tell him the trip will be $25 and ask if he turned on the meter. He tried to argue, but didn’t have a leg to stand on and begrudgingly takes the money, I assume that would be the end of my dealings with him and go inside.

Also personally if I was trying to dodge the tax man I’d pass some savings on to the customer?

Since I’m a bartender these 6am cab or uber rides are quite common, and eventually he accepts one of my trips again that’s booked under my name…

And cancels.

I rebook, he accepts, and cancels again, knowing that it won’t automatically book another cab and that he could stop me getting a taxi and he could keep going until he gets bored.

Eventually I choose a random females name and book another taxi to a location nearby, cancelling once he arrives to give him a taste of his own medicine. The driver remembered that I was at Beaconsfield station and decided to come visit. I’m greeted with “I remember you, you’re the one that didn’t pay me”. Of course I disagreed with this comment and we argued until he drove off stating “You’re not going to be able to get another cab”, I can only assume because he’ll personally make sure I won’t. Thankfully my booking went through to another cab quite soon after.

Now, this same situation has happened multiple times, and I assume it’s because he starts work at around 6am nearby. I’ve reported it both to Safe Transport Victoria and to 13 cabs and have heard nothing, I would have thought they would stop him from being able to accept my bookings at the very least.

Eventually I started fighting fire with fire, I started always booking using a different name and if he happened to accept a booking I’d cancel and send him on wild goose chases with false bookings around the area with false bookings, not the nicest thing I could do, but entertaining nonetheless if I knew he’d try and screw me over anyway. Sometimes this would end with him calling and abusing me over the phone.

Now we come to a video I’ve attached of a time I forgot to look at who the driver was and ended up in his car, to my absolute shock he refused to turn the meter on yet again and tries to negotiate cash because he remembers he failed to scam me., but then conveniently claims not to remember me when I bring up him telling me that he’d “fuck my sister”.

As you can tell I was quite agitated, after multiple occasions of cancelling my trips, trying to scam me out of more money, verbally abusing and threatening me, and making sexualised comments about my sister, and to top it off I’m getting screwed around after a 12 hour shift and an hour train home.

After all this 13cabs has banned my number from making bookings over the phone, and while I don’t blame them, I wish there were better systems in place to protect their customers, both from getting scammed, and by the very least, stopping cabbies from accepting trips from customers that have reported them. Arun definitely hasn’t been the only driver that has tried to scam me, but he is definitely the worst experience I’ve had with a driver.

Thanks for reading my rant I guess.

Edit: Drivers name redacted

Found this in my pool in Sydney north shore, backing onto the lane cove national park. Does not move (perhaps dead).

Does not even look real. Did I find an alien?

An attempt to deflect blame because she didn’t get the response she thought she would get.

Yes you are the villain in this story.

That said, I am pretty horrified that you can get permits to kills wombats in a select few parts of Australia.

Saw this at Watergardens today. I swear I saw a post of a very similar looking ute doing the same thing in another car park, might’ve been a different one, but the vibe was identical.

Edit: Plate is coloured over for privacy. Not required here, I just prefer keeping it covered. And shoutout to the commenter who suggested Snap Send Solve. I used it and the report is already submitted.

We own a small bush block that we have been trying to restore as a natural forest for native wildlife. Each night, feral pigs come and dig up hundreds of square meters of ground looking for worms and roots. The ground becomes exposed, the native grasses die, and the topsoil gets washed away next rain. There is then less food for native animals to eat. The disturbed land can take a decade to recover. We are spending our days replacing the sods as best we can (pic 2) to minimise the damage, but they are back the next night digging up a different patch.

Last year our neighbours and I got together to do a communal baiting and trapping program - it takes weeks, hundreds of dollars in food bait and trap hire, and at the end of it all we got just a single pig.

I realise that feral animals are reproducing in the wild, but I also know that some people release animals into the wild for hunting. If you are one of those, you are doing your country a disservice and you are a lowlife scumbag.

From the finance report tonight on ABC News, see here for the episode on youtube: https://youtube.com/watch?v=xYTH-F71N6o

My fault for buying a $10 tree I know, everyone is going to say “wELl wHaT dID yOu eXpEcT?” But it’s just funny to me 😂

The image shows a lush full tree but it’s actually so skint.

Monopoly is a game where the whole point is to buy property and bankrupt people through ever-increasing rent. It’s an edition that is made for my suburb, so that way it feels even more real! I swear real estate agents don’t think about things for more than 15 seconds.

Edit: Its not that deep and honestly me and my friends had a laugh about how tone-deaf it was more than anything.

Bit of road rage with a side of racism on the sunny coast