Hack

Walking out my building this morning I saw that someone had left a box of books out to be thrown away/taken, and I found Hack: How I Stopped Worrying About What to Do with My Life and Started Driving a Yellow Cab. I grabbed it, leaving in my own mail box my copy of How to Make Outrageously Smoking Hot Bitches Think They're the Only One When You're Fucking Them All, and headed to the train.

Long story short, college girl sick of meaningless advertising cubicle jobs gets her hack license and starts driving an NYC taxi, blogging about it here, and writes a book about her experiences. A good book, not a great one - eventually it settles into miles and miles of crazy person/drunk person/enraged fellow cabbie/non-tipping hipster stories ad nauseum; but it does give a rare peek into a business I'm completely ignorant of, which is always fascinating, a la Heat. Another complaint is she mentioned the daily lease was $132, but she never mentioned if there were days she actually lost money, or came close to it. But hey.

My favorite part is the hysterical unnoticed racism, as in her "cab college" instructor giving nicknames to everyone in her class. While obviously the only woman in the class, she is also the only American in there, and her classmates include the guy from Africa ("Motherland"), Javed the guy from Iran ("Shah Javed") and, my favorite, the guy from Afghanistan ("Taliban.")

Not to be outdone, she ends up at the taxi company where the dispatcher is the guy the character Louis DePalma was based on; and HE made sure to give everybody a colorful appellation whenever he would call them over the loudspeaker that their cab was ready. (SQUAAAAACK!) "Ahmed the terrorist, you're up." (SQUAAAAAK!) "Viktor the criminal" and of course the driver who was a cross-dresser (SQUAAAAAK!) "my boyfriend Harvey." Fucking dying.

I think I'd be good at something like that, being immersed into a job I've never expoerienced before and writing about it. I guess I could've done the Manny stuff, but that ship has sailed as I've forgetten 90% of anything worth reading. Ah well.

One more thing I like - she lives in my neighborhood, so I recognize streets and places all around me - this is still a big thrill to me; even though I've lived in NYC for 11 years and every person who has ever lived and written 2 sentences has mentioned it, I'm still like "5th Avenue?? In NYC? Wow - I've BEEN on 5th avenue!!! that's so cool!!!"