I think I found a home

As anyone who has been reading this knows I have been looking for a garage that I can work weekends out of. The problem I have been having with this is that the weekends are the most lucrative time to work and most garages allow the dispatchers to shakedown the drivers for a few bucks to work and get a decent car. This is a shitty practice which I wasn't going to get sucked into if I could help it.

Driving a cab is not an easy job in any capacity. There's the endless hours sitting in the car, traffic, and the risk, though small here in NYC, of being robbed. And drivers are the ones taking all the risks, so fuck anyone who wants to shake me down just for the privilege of busting my hump for 12 hours. I realized this attitude isn't conducive to getting what I want, which is to make decent money driving, but I also wanted to take a shot at finding someplace I felt comfortable and respected.

I was caught between a rock and a hard place to some extent until I decided to ask someone, but who could I ask? Being a white American born guy I don't know many other Taxicab drivers. Most taxicab drivers in NYC are immigrants who have come here and are busting their asses and I don't know any of them to ask. Another thing I've come to realize is that the other guys out there driving aren't my friends or co-workers, we are competitors so I guess sharing information isn't wise. Does Best Buy share info with Circuit City? I think not. Being an outsider in every way I didn't really know where to turn.

I'm a pretty resourceful guy so I thought about it and decided to contact Melissa Plaut who wrote an awesome book about her experiences driving a taxi in New York City and ask her where to go. In her book Hack: How I Stopped Worrying About What to Do With My Life and Started Driving a Yellow Cab she spoke highly of the garage she worked and said that the dispatchers aren't allowed to shakedown the drivers. The problem is that she changed the name of the garage in her book to protect people she worked with. I tried looking at the list of taxi garages on the Taxi and Limousine Commission to try to figure it out but had no luck. I figured I would email her, hoping she would help me out and she actually did give me a referral. I can't begin to express how much I appreciate this small act of kindness.

I went there yesterday and everything she said was 100% true. This is the only garage of the 3 I went to that someone sat down and went over everything with me and the owner of the garage seems to actually respects the work that drivers do. When I mentioned my concerns about having to grease the dispatchers just for the privilege of working 12 hours, he said something along the lines of drivers work too hard for their money and he's not going to let them get shaken down at his garage. I haven't heard ANYONE in the management end of this industry say anything that indicated respect for drivers so I was happy to hear this. It was refreshing and gave me some hope.

This is going to sound completely silly but the woman who took all my license information noticed that it was my birthday and wished me a happy birthday. I know its retarded but I'm a sucker for shit like that. I'm 36 today but that's a whole other can of worms. Of course I said yes and he went on to tell me a few things he thought I should know. Then the owner asked me if I wanted some tips on being a hack. We spent about 20 minutes with this, most of it seemed like common sense but that probably comes from reading about a similar conversation Melissa Plaut relayed in her book from when she started there. From there I was taken down to the garage and passed off to someone to show me how their meters worked. I sat in a taxi and went over the basic meter functions, it's all pretty common sense but there are a few different models of meters used and each has it's own little differences.

After a few minutes of that I was done and walked back through the industrial streets of Long Island City to the train home. I was happy, a little patience and resourcefulness seemed to pay off. I should be working Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday. I'm not crazy about working Sunday nights but the owner needed drivers for Sundays and I figured it would be a good trade off to get the nights I really wanted. If Sunday nights completely suck I'll just tell them I can't work Sundays and take it from there. All in all I'm a happy cabbie for now.