@idle_hands_nyc · 2024–2025
Getting paid to explore NYC
When I made the jump to moving to NYC, I definitely knew it was going to be the most unique and crazy place I would ever live, but I couldn’t have predicted the insane path it would take me down. Moving in, I was still working a corporate accounting job, while doing content creation whenever I could. I was making decent money with the content creation, but not enough to quit my job just yet. Then comes my roommates friend who put us onto a gatekept method that people were doing to make money in NYC… Filming idling commercial vehicles and reporting them to the city. (NYC Citizens Air Complaint Program) This method is still going strong until this day, basically you use your phone to record any trucks that are idling with their engine on, and send the video to a government portal, and you legit get paid $85-$150 per video depending on how many violations the trucker has. So legitimately after I did my research and went out on my own and recorded my first trucks for a week, this gave me the confidence to quit my job and do both the truck recording as well as content creation instead of my 9-5. So genuinely I was e-biking all around Manhattan for a couple hours a day usually getting around 15 trucks a day. It was genuinely bizarre feeling that I was getting paid to explore NYC and record trucks. I was pretty sneaky about it and most of the truckers wouldn’t notice me, but some did and they would try and chase me down. There was even a Verizon employee who just let me record their truck every day without stopping me or turning off his engine (this would void the video). Now it sounds like a dream job but once winter rolled around and my online business started getting much more traction, it didn’t make as much sense for me to keep doing it, so ended up moving to Miami for now. And this was just one aspect of living in NYC, alongside this was the unique events, nightlife, food, and people that made living in NYC amazing. Each category would probably deserve its own essay