Redecorating.

I’ve been trying to go through and update/edit the links sidebar. I got some stuff done but, they’ll be more to come.

One of the new links is for New York Hack, a blog written by a female yellow cab driver here in New York City. I wrestled the yellow beast for a few years back in my 20’s. There weren’t many female cab drivers when I was driving (one or two) so, it’s an interesting read for me at times.

People always seemed to make a lot out of being a cab driver. At the time (while I was doing this to earn money), it actually got to the point where people would introduce me to others with it. It was, ‘This is my friend Phil from New York. He drove a cab!’

It always grated on me.

It was like being introduced, ‘This is my friend Dave from Cleveland. He’s a proctologist!’ I use the analogy here because as a cab driver you spent the majority of your day surrounded by or dealing with assholes.

Cab driving was never fun.

Let me clarify that... cab driving... WAS... NEVER... FUN.

More along the lines of it being a really horrible job. Cab drivers are the butt of jokes. Everybody has their bad cab driver story. Blah, blah, blah... blah, blah, blah. What the job works out to is long, long hours with quite a bit of frustration.

As a cab driver in New York, everyone was (is) out to get you: trucks making deliveries and double parking are in your way, buses are lumbering down the street like the traffic equivalent of sperm whales, other cab drivers looking for fares are like are like hungry animals competing with you for food, the cops look down upon you, the TLC looks upon you as a revenue stream, pedestrians daring you to hit them, out of state drivers riding along doing the grand tour, black cars double parking all over the place blocking up streets, the owners looks upon you as a necessary evil and the fares... well that’s another one of the great things about New York.

The fares are just unbelievable.

Rich people get in a cab thinking that you’re their chaffuer du jour. Poor people get in the cab thinking somehow you’re part of the public transportaion system.

Let me clear up something: Yellow cabs are not public transporation - people may think they’re public transportation but, they’re not:

Cabs are not subsidized by the government.
Cab drivers are not city or state employees with the wealth of benefits that come along with the job.
There is no sick pay for cab drivers.
There is no holiday pay.
You can see a billboard or a bumper sticker with a number to call when a cop is shot but, if a taxi driver is killed during a robbery it usually is amazing if it makes it into the first ten pages of the paper. It is a thankless job.

Cab drivers spend anywhere from 8 to 12 (to more) hours driving the streets of the city.

Umm, have any of you driven around the city? Try getting your kidneys bounced around for that long and see how you feel afterward. We’re not talking about the world’s most well maintained roadways here in New York. Plus, you think the owners are putting the best equipment out there for the comfort of the drivers and the riding public? Think again.

Still, all in all, it’s the cab drivers fault: it’s the cab drivers fault when you want to go to the theater district at 8pm when every other idiot is trying to make curtain, it’s the cab drivers fault when you’re looking to go back home to Brooklyn after drinking to much after work on a Thursday or a Friday around 11pm or midnight when every other drunking fool is trying to go home to Brooklyn, it’s the cab drivers fault when the stupid street fair or parade or presidential visit is going on and traffic is crawling. Are we getting a better picture of things?

No, it’s not a fun job, never was.

Beyond that, people have this overly romantic view of what a taxi driver’s life is like. They’ve watched too many reruns of Taxi or seen Taxi Driver one too many times. It always used to make me laugh, just how stupidly naïve people would be. Every time someone would get into a conversation in the cab, they would ask, ‘So, what else do you do? Are you an actor?’

Ummmm... no, I am doing this because I neeed to eat.

So, after living a couple of years and noticing there were far too many people around me who were really something else but worked a day job as part of their secret identity, I one day just gave it up.

Cold turkey.

I could have kept doing it but, if I did I would have never done anything else and the thought of getting to the age I’m at now just driving a cab seemed like a horrible prospect. Not that the jobs I have had have been anything to write home about, it’s more along the lines of having something to compare them to.