It Isn't A Job... It's an Adventure

So often, back when I drove a taxi, my fares would ask, "Are you doing anything else besides THIS?"

As though THIS was a dirty low-life occupation and wasn't honorable or good enough... Good enough for what? It's an honorable profession if I wanted to make it that way... if I should so choose. Would it be a more fulfilling job to sit at a desk in an office counting beans or selling widget?

I usually answered that it, driving a hack, was okay with me and tried to change the subject.

Okay then… ? Okay is enough, but I kept it a secret. The secret was that driving a hack was the only job with adrenaline levels that could be compared to something like combat… or dealing drugs… or burglarizing houses…. What the hell, it is legal and clean and I never knew from one minute to the next exactly what was going to happen. And I could do it all without risking going to jail if I kept my nose clean.

Of course, I'm not talking about day-shift driving. It takes an entirely different critter to take on the daylight hours in a cab. What I'm talking about here is night driving… the Gravy Yard shift. The traffic is easier, the risks are higher, the fares are … well, night people. Those three am drug runs.... that drunk looking for his car at four am.... those businessmen going to the airport after five am... and then I went home with cash in my pocket   and had very few obligations to the office except to make my drop.

            It looks easy doesn't it? Well, try it. See how you like dealing with arrogant and sometimes doped-up kids or old alkies. See how you like having some trust-fund baby chiding you for taking him the long way when there was only one way to go.... or haggling over the price of a flat rate to the airport from a Montecito suit whose property taxes on his estate amounts to ten times what I'd make that year! Tell me about it after some punk runs out and disappears on a twenty-dollar fare... or pulls out a knife hoping to rob you of the few bucks you have in your pocket. Let me ask you, over a could beer at 7:00 am, after a night of this, "How do you like the job?"

Man, if you say you love it... I mean, Love It! Then you are qualified to drive a hack. Man, it smells like cash… cold hard cash… and that's okay… just okay with me.