Knockin' back the pie?

As a taxi driver you have the option to flick a switch in your cab, turn the radio to silent, and transmit everything from the car to the base.  It's called the M13 alert and is compulsory in every taxi in NSW.  Usually, however, the transmissions are false alarms, and you can simply hear what's going on in the cab, which can be quite interesting.

One night a driver flicked his switch accidentally, and I could hear very clearly everything going on in the cab.  He picked up a couple of passengers, asked them where they were going (which is very useful info should the driver actually be in trouble), and set off.  You could hear the blinking lights operating, acceleration away from lights and so on.

The driver went up Darby Street Cooks Hill, and there is a famous late-night pie shop halfway along.  The passengers hurriedly told the driver to stop, while they dashed into the shop to get pies.  "You want one yourself driver?"  "Nah, I've just had tea" "Go on, it's our shout, mate!"  "Nah, sorry, couldn't fit it in".

At the time, the driver was completely tieing up one of the three transmission channels completely, so we switched off Channel 2 and were issuing jobs on Channels 1 and 3 instead.  Things went on for about a quarter of an hour and we'd listen to the driver with the M13 on every few minutes to make sure it really was a false alarm.

Eventually the driver twigged something was wrong.  It was quite a busy time, and no radio transmissions would have been received by the car for a while.  He should have at least heard a few jobs being called and a few cars calling in.  He flicked the switch off and came through.

"Yes, car 57, you've had channel two tied up for the last twenty minutes"

"Sorry control, everything's okay"

"Yeah, we got a bit worried about you when you knocked back the pie, but we assumed as much"

"Oh...  Sorry"

It was okay, he hadn't said anything stupid or emabrrassing.  This was not the case all the time!

"Cars go back to normal transmission on Channels 1 and 2"