My Office Has No Walls
Where I work, it doesn’t have cubicles or Zoom meets. It has four wheels, a meter and a city that never sits still ever. I’m a taxi driver in New York City, not one of those black cars or shared rides, just a regular yellow cab, the kind that’s been part of the city longer than most of the people in it. Every day, I drive to make a living out of it, breathing puzzle. Manhattan’s grid, Brooklyn’s curves, Queens’ chaos. I’ve got it all memorized. GPS? That’s for tourists. I know which avenues flow fast at 2 PM and which intersections are suicidal at rush hour. I’ve dodged more potholes than you’ve had hot meals.
The interesting part is I didn’t even grow up here. I came from Dhaka twelve years ago, and back then driving a cab felt like a step up to earning fast and sending money back home. I didn’t really expect to be doing this for so long, but I am still here. This job keeps me grounded sometimes literally, when traffic doesn’t move for 45 minutes.
But there’s magic in this grind. I’ve driven models heading to castings in SoHo. Grandmothers are visiting grandkids in the Bronx. A Hasidic man and a drag queen once shared the back seat and laughed about gefilte fish. You don’t see that anywhere else in the world, only in this metal box on wheels.
Of course, it’s not all heartwarming stories. I’ve been yelled at, stiffed on tips, threatened, even robbed once in the Lower East Side. But I’ve also been handed surprise twenty-dollar bills “just for being kind.” I’ve had riders who prayed before leaving. One gave me a homemade sandwich at 2 AM because she thought I looked tired.
I have thought about quitting a lot of times, but the medallion loan I took is a weight around my shoulders. Uber rushed our rates. The city gives us tickets for blinking the wrong way. But then I catch a glimpse of the skyline at dawn from the Queensboro Bridge, and I remember why I stay.
You don’t become rich driving a cab here. But you become something else, a quiet witness to a million lives. A thread in the city’s story. That’s not nothing.
And yet, I’ll be back tomorrow. Same yellow car, same wild city and ready for anyone who walks through that floor.