For this New York City cabdriver, rushing a woman with a sea urchin stuck in her foot to the hospital, busing a pair of dominatrixes uptown and seeing another cab taken out by an 18-wheeler are regular fare. Someone give Melissa Plaut a reality TV show.
Plaut is one of the 197 female taxicab drivers in New York (out of 42,000 licensed cabbies) and is documenting her exploits on her blog, New York Hack, the Associated Press reported today.
You've gotta love her for posting a photograph of an out-of-towner blocking traffic in his fancy sports car while asking for directions. (Never mind the fact that it would make me a little uneasy to have a cabdriver who periodically took photographs while driving.) Plaut's blog is chock-full of photos of city scenes -- through which those of us outside NYC can live vicariously -- like one that shows a blurred, rain-drenched city street bursting with color, or another of the sun setting beneath the FDR bridge. But for some balance, she also documents the citys grittier side: a woman flicking her off as she drives by, graffiti on the wall of the taxi garage reading "No pissing, no urinating," a trash-covered street and, of course, nasty traffic jams.
The real reason to read Plaut's blog, though, is for her kick-ass, take-no-hostages attitude. She details an encounter with another cabbie who got out of his cab and punched her window after she didnt let him cut her off in traffic:
"He came up to my cab and started yelling at me, but I just ignored him and casually waved him away, as if he were an insignificant little mosquito," she writes. "I guess that bothered him even more because that's when he punched the window He would not have done that if I was a guy, but I'm not, so he felt safe acting like such a reckless dick. I was so angry, I grabbed my camera and opened my door and said, 'You wanna hit me? Go ahead. I'm right here. What the fuck are you gonna do now?'"
I'm bookmarking this site.
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