In case you haven’t heard 100,000 Wall Streeters are expected to hit the pavement buy the end of the year. Surely some will make it back to financial services after a time but how will many of those redundancies manage? According to the New York Times Scott Curtis spent 25 years trading stocks on Wall Street before he lost his job in the recession. At his taxi garage in the South Bronx, Mr. Curtis, 47, shares job-hunting tips with another felled financier, who drives home after shifts to Westchester County in his own car, a BMW. They wave hello to a pal, laid off from JPMorgan, who drives to help pay for her son’s European study-abroad program.
It is a long slide from the trading floor to the driver’s wheel of a taxicab, but these former bankers have adopted a bullish outlook on their new profession. They say taxi driving, with its flexible hours and all-cash wages, is an undervalued asset — and an efficient way to meet potential employers face to face.
“There are 20 million other people on Monster.com,” said Mr. Curtis, who chats up his fares in case a chief executive or headhunter has stumbled in. “I thought people would see this, and think, ‘He’ll go the extra yard to go and get a job.’ ”
More accustomed to the back seat of a taxi, these cabbies are importing skills from their former world to the front seat, dressing well to impress their “clients” and finding ways to exploit the inefficiencies of the taxi market….
Read more at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/16/nyregion/once-wall-streeters-and-now-cabbies.html?_r=2&pagewanted=1&sq=taxi&st=cse&scp=3
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