Forget about teaching: those who can't, read.

I'm not overly fond of working jobs. It's weird, then, that a lot of the memoirs I really enjoy are "working life" memoirs: Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential, Debra Ginsberg's Waiting: The True Confessions of a Waitress, Steve Martin's Born Standing Up, etc. Yet another interesting entry in this pantheon is Melissa Plaut's Hack: How I Stopped Worrying about What To Do with My Life and Started Driving a Yellow Cab (it's newly out in paperback, but I prefer the hardcover cover).

I really enjoyed this one. Truly casting about for something to "do" with her life, Plaut decides to get her taxi license.  There's nothing fancy here; it's just a "year in the life" of a New York City cab driver, complete with pictures of other drivers giving her the finger, as well as some nice shots of the city itself.

So, yes, my whole life is about avoiding work. But that doesn't mean I don't like to hear about other peoples' jobs, mainly because they wow me. I mean, really. Can you imagine driving a cab in New York City? I can barely get downtown in my Midwestern "city" without whimpering. (Okay, there's really very little I can do without whimpering, but still.) Color me impressed:

"That first day, it took me two hours to get my first fare. She was a middle-aged Spanish waitress just coming off work from a diner on 14th Street and Avenue B in the East Village.

I was so nervous, mainly about going the wrong way, but she soothed me. 'How long have you been doing this?'

I didn't want her to know how green I really was, so I lied. 'About a month.'

'Do you like it?'

'Um, yeah. It's okay so far.'

She said, 'I've actually been thinking about getting into it. Was it hard to get your license?'

I explained the process and encouraged her to try it, said we needed more women drivers on the streets to balance things out a little bit. I tried to act like I knew what I was talking about.

At the end of the trip, she said, 'Here, I'm giving you everything I made in tips tonight,' and handed me a total of $14 for a $10 fare.* I couldn't thank her enough." (p. 40.)

If there's a heaven, I hope it's filled with waitresses and cab drivers. Have a good weekend, all.

Comments

[Sarah]

I was at a store yesterday and the service assistant was a very nice young lady. When she rang up the total, I realized that she had not included two bowls which she'd already wrapped. I told her that she hadn't rung them up yet and gave her my card back - told her she could just start another transaction. She said it was her first day. Now i know I'm hopelessly honest, but I wonder how many people would have called that to her attention.

[Mary]

I too like reading books about other people's jobs, maybe it is a symptom of having had the same job for decades, but I think it is a way to peek into other people's lives, like going for a walk when it is dark out and looking in living room windows. And when you read and book like this you get a sense of what goes on behind the scenes and what the person you are interacting with in a store, cab, restaurant is really thinking.

[Citizen Reader]

Sarah,
You are a queen among women. Not only would very few people have brought that to the worker's attention, but if the mistake had been caught, they would have chewed the girl out for making a mistake on her first day and demanded the merchandise free anyway for their personal trauma. People are charming that way. Did I ever tell you how much I cried my first week at the public library? My co-workers thought I was a basket case, but it was just because I had come from an academic library. I was NOT PREPARED for the general public.

[Citizen Reader]

Mary,
I agree. I enjoy these types of memoirs so much more than the personal tragedy/family abuse types; they're usually sarcastic but more upbeat, and I enjoy the look at other jobs. Maybe because I don't like working jobs, I just want to learn about them. Although most of the time I recognize that I probably don't want to know what the person on the other side of the transaction is thinking... :)