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Cabbie Blogs About Driving Taxi in NYC
NEW YORK - Welcome to the world of Melissa Plaut, a taxi driver who chronicles her chaotic, adventurous job in a blog called "New York Hack."
With words and digital photographs, Plaut offers a glimpse into the life of the New York cabbie, from the locker room where she and other drivers wait to begin their shifts to the pit stops they make and the gridlock and grueling 12-hour night shifts they endure.
It is difficult work, and Plaut says she doesn't like it most of time. The blog, which she started in August, "has really helped me cope with the job."
It has also given her readers — including some far from New York — a taste of the Big Apple. Her Web site gets between 400 and 900 hits a day.
Plaut, 30, is an unlikely representative for the roughly 42,000 licensed taxicab drivers in New York: Just 197 are women. She hears some variation of "Oh, a female cab driver!" as many as 20 or 30 times a night.
The daughter of teachers, Plaut grew up in suburban Pomona, N.Y. After graduating from the University of New Mexico in 1997, she moved to New York City, where she got a job as a writer and copy editor at an advertising agency.
She started driving a cab about a year ago after being laid off, which she says was a blessing. She couldn't bring herself to return to office work, so she stopped trying to figure out what she was going to do with her life and decided to "treat it as an adventure."
"Hopefully it's not what I'm going to be doing for the rest of my life," she said.
Plaut spent roughly $400 to get through the licensing process, which includes a medical exam, fingerprinting and three eight-hour sessions of taxi school. After passing a test and an English proficiency exam, she officially became a New York cabbie — a move that didn't exactly thrill her parents.
Check out the New York Hack.
NEW YORK - Welcome to the world of Melissa Plaut, a taxi driver who chronicles her chaotic, adventurous job in a blog called "New York Hack."
With words and digital photographs, Plaut offers a glimpse into the life of the New York cabbie, from the locker room where she and other drivers wait to begin their shifts to the pit stops they make and the gridlock and grueling 12-hour night shifts they endure.
It is difficult work, and Plaut says she doesn't like it most of time. The blog, which she started in August, "has really helped me cope with the job."
It has also given her readers — including some far from New York — a taste of the Big Apple. Her Web site gets between 400 and 900 hits a day.
Plaut, 30, is an unlikely representative for the roughly 42,000 licensed taxicab drivers in New York: Just 197 are women. She hears some variation of "Oh, a female cab driver!" as many as 20 or 30 times a night.
The daughter of teachers, Plaut grew up in suburban Pomona, N.Y. After graduating from the University of New Mexico in 1997, she moved to New York City, where she got a job as a writer and copy editor at an advertising agency.
She started driving a cab about a year ago after being laid off, which she says was a blessing. She couldn't bring herself to return to office work, so she stopped trying to figure out what she was going to do with her life and decided to "treat it as an adventure."
"Hopefully it's not what I'm going to be doing for the rest of my life," she said.
Plaut spent roughly $400 to get through the licensing process, which includes a medical exam, fingerprinting and three eight-hour sessions of taxi school. After passing a test and an English proficiency exam, she officially became a New York cabbie — a move that didn't exactly thrill her parents.
Check out the New York Hack.
posted by littledevilworks at 8:43 PM
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