On the other end of the scale

Michael Grynbaum has an article in The New York Times about guys who, while not rich like the Murdochs, are probably happier:

Scott Curtis spent 25 years trading stocks on Wall Street before he lost his job in the recession. Now he drives a yellow cab, not just to make a living, but also to find his next post: He hangs a hiring pitch in the back seat. “Three interviews so far,” he said with a grin.
At his taxi garage in the South Bronx, 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 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.
While most cabbies view the meatpacking district in Manhattan as a must for late-night fares, Herb Reyes, once a financial director at a major entertainment company, sees a market with excess supply. So he heads to the usually deserted Avenue of the Americas in Midtown, where he knows bankers who work the Asian markets will be looking for rides home.
Tough times have prompted more New Yorkers to seek financial relief and upward mobility in the taxi trade. The number of licensed city cabbies has risen by ten percent since the stock market began its decline in late 2007, according to the Taxi and Limousine Commission. License renewals are up, too, officials said, suggesting that drivers who used to move on to higher-paying jobs are sticking with the hack trade for now.
At Master Cabbie Taxi Academy in Long Island City in Queens, instructors have noticed an increase in former financial workers since the recession began. “As they lay off, people come through,” the owner, Terry Gelber, said. “I haven’t driven in eighteen years, but somebody I drove with back then was a broker. He was back last year to get his hack license again.”
Reyes, 38, registered for a cabby license after the severance from his former job ran out. “People weren’t hiring at the salary I was making,” he said on the phone from Westchester, where he lives with his wife and two sons, who both attend private school. “They weren’t offering jobs at a level below, or even two levels below, where I was.” When a friend suggested he look into taxi driving, he scoffed. “I was born and raised in the city,” Reyes recalled saying. “I’m not driving a cab in New York.” But on his first night he cleared $180 on fares. It was a Tuesday. “I could only imagine what Saturday and Sunday would be like,” he said.
Passengers who climb into Curtis’ cab are greeted by a laminated sheet of paper reading: “Ask to see my résumé. You won’t be sorry!” It has led to three interviews, one with a major British bank, though none has yet resulted in a job offer. Curtis, who is hoping to land a hedge-fund position, said he decided to become a cabby after having little luck with traditional headhunters and job websites. “I just figured the best way to market myself was to be driving around town with a sign that said: ‘Hey, help me! I need a job!’ ” he said. Curtis, divorced with two children and living in Cliffside Park, New Jersey, is earning a small fraction of his former income, he said. He is asked for his résumé about four times a day but acknowledges that, after five months, he had hoped to already be back in an office. “I get guys who say, ‘This is ingenious!’ I’m like, if I’m such a genius, why am I driving a cab?”
The stigma of the job, although softened, is not entirely gone. The JPMorgan veteran agreed to be interviewed on the condition that only her first name, Janet, be published. Her job, she said, could prompt her condo board on the Upper East Side to consider ousting her from the building. Janet was finishing an afternoon shift the other day in her work uniform: a navy blazer, floral scarf, and Ralph Lauren sunglasses. She was raised in Manhattan, but cab driving was never part of the plan. “I always thought cabdrivers were idiots,” she said. “I still do. If anything, that has been reaffirmed.” The regulars at the garage in the Bronx did not think she would last a week; two years later, she is still driving. She keeps a stack of twenty résumés by the driver’s seat, handing them out to passengers. One man submitted her name for three jobs at UBS, but it came to nothing. “I wanted a job while my son was in Europe,” she said. ”I set myself a benchmark that by the time he’s back, I’d have a real job. And when he came back, and I didn’t...” Her voice trailed off. “I was depressed for a week,” she said. “I picked up some young kids from JPMorgan, who I knew didn’t know what they were talking about in the cab, but they had the job. I didn’t. There’s a lot of people doing things now that they didn’t think they’d be doing,” Janet added.
The new crop of cabbies might do well to consider the example of a predecessor: James Williamson III, an MBA graduate who gained some renown in 2008 for his own résumé-in-the-back-seat routine. Although his efforts earned a segment on CNN, Williamson, who studied business at La Salle University, never found a job after eighteen months behind the wheel. “I never really got any leads,” he said on the phone from Philadelphia, where he now lives. “It was always ‘Keep your hopes up; things will work out.’ And I would say, ‘Are you guys hiring?’ They’d say, ‘Nobody’s hiring.’”
Last year, Williamson gave up his hack license after an aunt found him work as a nursing assistant. Today, he drives a van for disabled travelers. He is still looking for a professional position.

Rico says he once drove a cab in Palo Alto, California (where his radio handle was Palo 10) many years back, and he was happier, though not as rich as he'd become, before the divorce... But the photo puts him in mind of Joni Mitchell's song...