Hack: How I Stopped Worrying about What To Do With My Life And Started Driving a Yellow Cab
HBO has a show called “Taxicab Confessions,” which takes a look into the lives of cab passengers in Las Vegas and New York, one ride at a time. This show usually focuses on the more outrageous clients, with the driver only providing questions like “So, where you comin’ from?” or “How long you been dating?” to get the people in the back to spill their deepest secrets and weird sexual desires. But now, after reading Melissa Plaut’s Hack, I know why it’s better not to focus on what’s going on in the front seat.
After years of bad office jobs, Plaut decided to do something new and exciting with her life and get her taxi license. Since she has background as an advertising copywriter, one can’t help but wonder if she chose to take on this adventure not because of the allure of discovering New York City on a different level, but that being a twenty-nine-year-old white lesbian cab driver would make for a great blog, and then get a book deal out of it (She has since gotten both). Right now “stunt books” (books where people take a year or two from their normal lives to do something that will get the attention of literary agents) are all the rage, so even the premise of the book seems a bit, well, “hack.”
Another issue with the book is its clunky subtitle. If you’re looking for some Zen-like discovery on why driving around NYC at 4AM will make you a better person, you won’t find it here. In fact, the satisfaction Plaut gets from the job (besides the amount of big tippers she comes across) is over-shadowed by the list of medical complaints, bad customers and hassles from the police department. She also gets stressed when her parents hate her job choices, feels embarrassed when an old high-school classmate enters her cab, and gets a hint of jealousy when her best friend becomes a TV writer in LA. It gets to the point where you start rooting for Plaut to quit, instead of wondering what happens next to her when she enters the cab.
The only intriguing part of Plaut’s two year experience is the picture she paints of her fellow cabbies. Much like the television show “Taxi,” Plaut comes across a cast of colorful characters who are all worthy of being the starts of their own stories. From Ricky, who’s been on the job for over 30 years and has spent the last few of them reeking of his own urine (a medical condition which may have been caused by being behind the wheel of a car for 12 hours) to Helen/Harvey, a pre-op transsexual who Plaut sympathizes with, since Helen/Harvey is as close to a female co-worker as she has. These people are so interesting, Plaut would have been better served following these guy for a night or two then focusing on her own.
While Plaut does describe some truly terrifying incidents in Hack, it seems too much like a way for her to enter the literary world than a life-enriching. She says although she doesn’t want to drive a cab for the rest of her life, she says she missed the excitement the job brought. Maybe that’s because if she goes back, there will be enough material for a sequel, “Hack 2: Die Hackier.”
