Intro

I drive a taxicab in the city of Worcester, Massachusetts. Since our identities in this life are so closely associated with our jobs, this makes me "a taxi driver." When I meet someone new, they ask, "What do you DO?" They don't ask what I think, or what I eat (which is supposed to be what I "am" according to those in certain circles), or what I have.

Nope.

It's what you DO that people want to identify you by. So, you can identify me as "a taxi driver."

I didn't always drive a taxi. I've been an accounting clerk, a radio station assistant engineer, a lumberyard gopher, a mental hospital attendant, a turret lathe operator, and a QA lab technician, but mostly I've been an electronics technician for the past twenty years. Now I'm a year away from being able to take money out of my 401k without paying an extra 10% tax, and I'm pretty much fed up with all those other job titles. Besides, since I got laid off from my last "real job," the best offer I've had for my 20 years of experience in electronics has been less than half what I used to be paid. Nobody's getting that 20 years of experience for a lousy nine bucks an hour.

Am I grumbling? Nah. Driving the taxi is a lazy man's job. A lot of waiting around, and a lot of driving. But driving is hardly a labor intensive activity. Depressing the accelerator or the brake, turning the steering wheel... how much physical effort do you think is involved here?...

Mostly, it's about the people I drive around.

Ah, ...the people.

These are Worcester people, for the most part, and even if they're from out of town it's Worcester that they're in at the moment. The customer base for the taxi business is "people without a car." So, we get a pretty good cross section of all the various social strata in town. Sooner or later, just about everybody needs to take a taxi somewhere.

I'm not sure which directions this blog will take, but the anchor point and starting point is the fact that I drive a taxi here in Worcester. The Wormtown influence will make itself more apparent later on.