I’ve basically had every job in New York City. I’ve been a restaurant host, substitute teacher, background actor, jewelry maker, journalist. I was even a nanny for a day. So when Mayor Zohran Mamdani issued a call for emergency snow shovelers in anticipation of a blizzard, offering up to $30 an hour, I thought, Why not add to my résumé? I had seen the Bat-Signal, and I was ready to don the cowl.
Here was my chance to be a part of history, a big-government success story, a sort of winter Works Progress Administration. The warmth of collectivism would keep me toasty in the freezing cold as I served the socialist mayor’s snow-shoveling corps. “All you need to bring is two forms of ID to ensure you get paid,” Mamdani said in a video posted to X on Monday. Easy, right? Not quite.
What started with 16 inches of snow and a dream quickly morphed into something I can describe only as a bizarre, heartwarming, and frustrating journey. The bureaucracy was, to use a technical term, a hot mess.
