Iconic yellow taxis speckle the streets of New York City at any given time. While serving as a convenient form of transportation for most people, taxis offer a unique, urban-based career for others. Taxi drivers like Melissa Plaut, author of the blog-based book Hack: How I Stopped Worrying About What to Do with My Life and Started Driving a Yellow Cab, engage in this other side of the experience. Hack provides a first-hand account of the challenges and rewards of working as a taxi driver in the big city.
Plaut, a white girl from the suburbs of New York, joined the 1 percent of female taxi drivers working in NYC. After graduating from college, she decided that driving a taxi was the adventure she was searching for, and completed the cumbersome paperwork and exams in order to get her taxi license. Like all drivers that she knows, Melissa is borderline broke, relying on the money from her daily shifts and gloating about any tip she receives.
The pursuit of a sustainable living is the driving force of the taxi cab saga and provides the motivation to spend hours at the wheel. Drivers work long stressful hours, often skipping bathroom breaks, altering natural sleep schedules, and putting up with obnoxious New Yorkers—all so that they can make enough money to pay back the dispatcher (from whom they technically rent the car), cover gas costs, and then go home with sufficient pocket cash to pay bills and feed families.
Although this book focuses on taxi drivers, the story is relatable for all hard-working New Yorkers involved in difficult and stressful labor each day. Driving down the Van Wyck—the highway that Plaut associated with infamous traffic—the other day, I saw a yellow taxi inch past me in the next lane. Behind the wheels was an Indian man, who had probably just picked up a passenger from JFK. Like Melissa and millions of others, the driver next to me was a hard-working New Yorker, who happened to be transporting another New Yorker along the nondescript highways that join together this continuously frustrating yet endlessly exciting city.
Hack is easy to read and initially engaging, but after a short time it becomes tiresome. Like the nature of the job itself, Hack reads as a repetitive cycle of passengers and street names. The reader gets a feel for the occasionally stimulating but mostly monotonous hours on the job, but the intention of the book was to acknowledge the tedium, not experience it. Though there are some reflective pieces about New York City and its people, Hack is filled with “route talk.” Route talk is explained on the list of “The Seven Things You’re Not Supposed to Talk About,” a podcast episode of This American Life, as boring conversation “when people tell you how they arrived, or how they came, how they got on the road, which road, how long it took”: essentially humdrum topics that should not be discussed. What began as a quirky entertaining blog ended up as a too-long, 237-page book.
Instead of including a detailed account of the streets, fares, and tips, Plaut could have chosen to develop more thought-provoking ideas about the overall significance of taxis and their role in transportation. For instance, would it be better for the congested city if more people walked or took public transportation instead of a private cab? On a sociological level, how often do drivers, mostly immigrants hoping to live the American Dream, earn a decent-enough living so that they can leave the cab business, or at least enable their children to climb higher on the socioeconomic ladder? Do they resent the fact that they came to America to drive a taxi, or is it meaningful and exciting to drive through the city of opportunity?
Nonetheless, Melissa’s experience is unique, and as one of the few female taxi drivers in the city, she has some valid insights into the pressures of the job. Check out her blog and editorials published in the New York Times, Huffington Post, and other reputable sources. She writes well, and when confined by a newspaper’s word limit, does not drag on.
