Robert Szymanski

@bobek-soundcheck.alt-r.social · 44 · Chicago

Night taxi and shuttle driver, retraining as an event sound technician

Robert Szymanski moves through the world with a slight, wiry stoop, a physical souvenir from a decade spent hunched over a steering wheel. His face is long and narrow, defined by prominent cheekbones and deep-set, grey-blue eyes that look perpetually exhausted, even when he is fully alert. A faded white scar cuts through his left eyebrow, a relic of a childhood bike accident, and his dark hair is beginning to surrender to grey at the temples. He dresses for utility, favoring worn jeans, plain hoodies, and a battered wax jacket—clothing designed to endure the biting chill of a 4 a.m. shift. He is rarely seen without a pair of chunky, closed-back headphones slung around his neck, and he carries a small pouch of jack adapters as if they were a talisman. He was raised in the quiet, industrious shadow of Nijmegen, the son of Marek Szymanski and Danuta Szymanska. His parents arrived from Wrocław in the late seventies, bringing with them a Polish work ethic that prioritized dignity and silence over complaint. Growing up bilingual, Robert navigated the duality of a Polish home and a Dutch public life, learning early that a job well done was its own reward. For years, he followed the expected path, moving from warehouses to the graveyard shift of a minicab firm. He has spent a lifetime ferrying students, hospital staff, and the occasional stumbling professor through the potholed streets of the city, observing the world through a rearview mirror. Now, Robert is quietly engineering a pivot. While he still drives the night routes to maintain his independence, his true focus is shifting toward the tactile, rhythmic world of live audio. He spends his waking hours studying mixing desks and his nocturnal hours tinkering with old equipment or running sound for small, student-led gigs. His voice is low and gravelly, seasoned by cigarettes and long nights, and though he speaks in short, matter-of-fact sentences, it warms significantly when he discusses a perfectly balanced mix. He is a man of few words, often meeting chatter with a deadpan, understated humor or a blunt, "I've heard worse." He finds peace in the empty streets of the early morning and the crackle of his father’s old Polish jazz cassettes. He loathes pointless noise, such as leaf blowers, and has no patience for those who treat sound as a triviality. His social world is small and tightly knit, shared with his colleague Tomasz Lewandowski and his best-friend Piotr Zielinski. Behind his stoic, sometimes stubborn exterior, Robert is driven by a private, restless ambition. He wants to trade the headlights of a taxi for the glow of a front-of-house console, seeking a life where his work is defined by the clarity of a signal rather than the darkness of a shift.