Melissa Plaut Interview at Inside ontheinside.info

Three years ago, Melissa Plaut left the corporate world to earn a living driving a New York taxi cab. Her first book Hack: How I Stopped Worrying About What to Do with My Life and Started Driving a Yellow Cab about her experience as a cabbie is out today, August 28th. Melissa also writes a popular blog, New York Hack, at http://newyorkhack.blogspot.com.

Questions with Melissa Plaut:

ontheinside.info: What were you doing before driving a taxi?

MP: I basically was working in advertising, even like the shittiest form of it which was copy writing for the websites of large companies. I hated it the whole time I was there but of course, you know, I was very comfortable, the money was really good.

ontheinside.info: Did you pursue advertising?

MP: No, not at all. I promised myself I would never work in advertising. I worked at a magazine for a little while. I even worked at Miramax filmsâ€”that was my first job, I was the concierge. I worked at weird websites. I worked at some part-time job as a chat room moderator for some weird sex, non-sex site. You know like I was just doing a job making twenty bucks an hour and being pretty irresponsible and having fun. And somebody came alongâ€”a friend of a friend was like “Oh yeah, you should come work for the company I work at, itâ€™s totally great”. I didnâ€™t know what it was or what it meant. I went in and didnâ€™t realize it was an interview.

ontheinside.info: So that was the copy writing job?

MP: I think the initial offer was half-writer, half-something else. And it was double what I had been making at the magazine. But I still said no, because I didnâ€™t want to do it. It just seemed really weird and I thought I could do other things. And then they got a budget to have a full writer, like a second writer and for more money. So when they emailed me again, I was like “Oh yes, I need to just try and erase the air of desperation, I need a jobâ€”everything is going away, thereâ€™s no more dot com boom”.

ontheinside.info: How long did you end up working there?

MP: I worked there for three years. I was reduced to part-time after a year and a half cause they werenâ€™t doing so well. And that was awesome, cause I made a good salary, three days a week, I made full benefits, you know? I never wanted to leave, but I was also disappointed in what I was going in and doing every day. Ultimately there wasnâ€™t enough work in the end. They were suffering too much and laid me off. And then I collected my unemployment benefits. I love my unemployment benefits, Iâ€™ll never say no to that (laughs). And then I was like, “Fuck it, I donâ€™t want a career, Iâ€™m not getting anywhere and Iâ€™m not happy”. So instead of going straight for another ad job, which would have been maybe the easier thing to do, I decided to go from one thing to the other to the other and do whatever the hell I wanted.

ontheinside.info: And so you started to drive a cab?

MP: Well that was the first adventure on the list. Itâ€™s something I thought about, even the previous time I had been unemployed. And when I thought about it then, it wasnâ€™t even a real thought, you know, just like “Oh! Iâ€™ll be a cab driver, ha!” This time I was like, “Wouldnâ€™t that be cool? Iâ€™m going to make it happen, I got nothing else to do”. And I went ahead. It scared the shit out of me. Because itâ€™s really scary to go and be the only girl whoâ€™s doing this, first of all. Well, not the only one but you walk into a room to apply and thereâ€™s fifty guys sitting, waiting to turn in their applications, and Iâ€™m the only girl there thatâ€™s not working there, you know, behind the counter. So, it was scary to just break out into the total unknown, but that was I guess part of the adventure. So that was the first step, that was three years ago. Now, Iâ€™m kind of moving, slowly moving on. But Iâ€™m not going to probably ever give up driving a cab totally cause thereâ€™s something addictive about it.

ontheinside.info: How has driving a cab changed your perception of the city?

MP: I know it a lot better and Iâ€™m obsessed with traffic! When Iâ€™m not working Iâ€™m sort of watching it, just sort of interested, listening to the traffic even though Iâ€™m not going to be in a car. You know that channel on cable, City Drive Live, itâ€™s like channel 93 or 91 and itâ€™s just all the traffic cams. Sometimes I put that on and Iâ€™m like, “Ahh, Grand Central is so fucked up right now”. Itâ€™s really weird, itâ€™s like a fetish at this point, I donâ€™t even know. Maybe itâ€™s just more like a professional interest. I am a terrible backseat driver as well. But Iâ€™ve met more people in the city than I would ever meet in the normal course of my life, in any other job. Even as a waiter or waitress, a certain kind of clientele comes into your place, but anybody and everybody takes a cab.

Interview by Thomas Collardeau, photo by Scott Gordon Bleicher for http://ontheinside.info

To check out Melissa Plaut’s profile and favorite NY places at ontheinside.info, click here.

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