Personal experience: how an actor worked as a taxi driver and what came of it

Theater actor Lenkom Igor Konyakhin published an interesting story about how he decided to earn money as a taxi driver during a pandemic:

“Due to the current financial situation in the theater sector, I have a need for additional income. And I decided to become a taxi driver. What's cool, I thought. I will learn how to communicate with people, see interesting images, characters, look at the world from a different angle.

I decided to cabby through the taxi company in their car. The conditions are as follows: you roll on 6200, you get 2350 in your hands - this is a plan that must be fulfilled. Everything that you earned in excess of the plan, you share with the taxi company in half. Car, gasoline, car wash - on them.

So. He took the docks, they were otxeri, they were sent somewhere, approved, the next day they issued a waybill, a driver's card, keys to a four-year-old Solaris with a mileage of 460000 km!!!! And I, handsome, washed, smooth-shaven, with excitement, as at the premiere, went out on my first shift in my life "in the role" of a taxi driver.

I connect to the application taximeter, food. I think now I will quickly fulfill the plan (those same 6200), then a little, so as not to be too much, beyond the plan, I will get money, go to the grocery store and go home to my family.

Aha! How!

Just to get the same plan, it took me 12 hours (!) Of intensive driving.

And orders come one after another. It happens that the previous passenger has not yet arrived, but the next order has already arrived; I take the next one, then another and another, and so on almost the entire shift. If you do not leave the line, then there is practically no time to run to the toilet.

After the first shift, having ridden 16 hours and 400 km in Moscow and the nearest Moscow region, having received 3400 in the taxi company and another 400 rubles in tips, I, stupefied, devastated, went home.

In this mode, I worked six shifts.

Of these, three shifts in a row, and these three shifts deserve a more detailed description. Gradually, all thoughts and images disappear from the head, except for the road, cars, traffic lights, road barriers, turns, lanterns. You close your eyes, trying to fall asleep for three or four hours and see the headlights of oncoming cars flying at you behind your closed eyelids, you feel the hum and vibration, you hear the prompts of the "Yandex navigator", you accelerate, slow down, crash, open your eyes, close your eyes, accelerate again, you don't fit into a turn, slow down, accelerate, crash, change gear, accelerate, fly into a fence, slow down, hear an alarm, shower, coffee, five in the morning, it's time to drive, get on the line, change gear, accelerate, go to order, take passenger, "good morning", accelerating, driving, stopping, "All the best", switching gears, standing in a traffic jam, "good afternoon", accelerating, driving, "finding a faster route", slowing down, "Goodbye", traffic light, traffic jam, stalled, fucking, wound up, phew, accelerate, "there is a camera at 60", slow down, "good night", park, hobble home, and again close your eyes, trying to sleep for three or four hours.

And the men in the taxi company take a car for a week, for two, then they drink for several days and again. As a rule, no one goes to one shift, they say, one shift at a time is harder. I do not understand.

And clients are almost all silent. They sit in the back seat and are silent, buried in the phone. Unless drunks come across - those are more sociable and more fun. So gloomy taxi drivers drive, they take gloomy passengers across gloomy Moscow from gloomy point A to gloomy point B.

And I began to guess why our people are so dark. How can you not be dark if you spend most of your life getting your daily bread? Where to get the time to think, and why all this? Where to get the time to see the sky, read books, go to the theater (oh yes! Theater is not likely to fit into the budget anyway). And they thump in between shifts. And they thump not because it's cool, but because, under all the information noise, they know that it is IMPOSSIBLE to live like this! But this knowledge is unbearably difficult. That's why they listen to all kinds of shit. Behind this music, one's own thoughts are not so audible. And they are angry with themselves, but they think they are angry with Putin, with Trump, with the World Government, with Yandex, etc. And in the eyes of these once-future astronauts, athletes, rescuers, inventors there is a deep unconscious longing.

And this applies not only to taxi drivers. You meet the same views in the crowded morning trains from some Petushki, for example, at the checkout counters of supermarkets, at gas stations, etc.

What am I doing? And to the fact that I again and again realize what a wonderful profession I have: "ACTOR"! What opportunities it contains for self-development, for spiritual growth! What interesting topics we sometimes touch upon during rehearsals! What wonderful people we meet in our field! And I am very sad that such a phenomenon as a theater, which is like a star in the darkness of ignorance and ignorance, though not always brightly and distinctly, but still illuminates the path, is increasingly blocking the oxygen in stages.

An artist should not become a taxi driver! It shouldn't, and that's it! As a temporary experience - yes, it's cool, interesting, and even, maybe, useful, but such a practice for a long time will kill the actor, break his apparatus, make him empty, heartfelt and angry.

Will I cabby again? If the situation in the theater does not change for the better, which is unlikely in the light of the developing events, and there are no offers in the cinema, where will I go? Will. But very carefully, so as not to kill the actor in yourself..."