EZ-QUEASY!
HOWIE: I held out on toll transponder as long as I could
I finally threw in the towel to Big Brother yesterday — after all these years, I put an E-ZPass transponder in my car.
I held out as long as I could, but in the end, with the toll booths out of business at the end of the week, what choice did I have? It was either affix the pass to my front windshield or the hacks were going to gouge me even more, mailing the bills in a nice orange envelope, the same color as a traffic cone … or a parking ticket.
In other words, they made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.
How many objections do I have to paying these tolls? First of all, the fact that they were supposed to end almost 30 years ago. Then there is the 1984-esque aspect of being tracked from the gantries, whatever they are, as I travel down the highway.
But really, I was never that concerned about receiving a ticket because it only took me so many minutes to get from Allston to Weston. I don’t have that heavy a foot, plus, like every other highway in the state, the Pike is increasingly a parking lot.
No, my real fear was that sooner or later the credit card I was using to pay for the transponder would be compromised and suddenly I’d find myself getting “tickets” because my bank card no longer worked. And then I would find myself with a bunch of $50 tickets, after which I would have to call … a hack, to beg for mercy, for something that was beyond my control.
I’m going to miss the toll booths, I really am.
The toll takers are Teamsters, of course, and I’ve had my beefs with them over the decades. It’s a dangerous job, carrying those change drawers across traffic at the toll plazas. At your average supermarket, approximately .0000001 percent of the cashiers annually drop the trays on their feet and have to go out on workers’ comp. At the Pike, the annual casualty rate was approximately 25 percent. Go figure.
A few years back, the head of the Teamsters local claimed that he had actually seen me spit on quarters before I handed them to members of the International Brotherhood. Really? Does that seem like a workable plan, under any circumstances?
Of course not. But with the statute of limitations running out on all things toll booth, I will plead guilty to something else.
Remember those change buckets they used to have? They’ve been gone for some time now, but you would glide into the plazas and then throw your quarters into the buckets.
Sometimes, the buckets would get jammed up. Who knows why. Maybe I wasn’t the only one tossing slugs into them.
Anyway, the gate wouldn’t go up, so finally somebody would get exasperated enough to floor it, knocking down the flimsy wooden gate. At that point everybody could drive through for free. But many of the commuters were so terrorized by the hackerama that they would just keep tossing change — and bills — into the bucket.
The Pike “repairmen,” 100 percent of whom were hacks, would never budge from their barstools, and pretty soon the buckets would be overflowing with change and legal tender.
This was when I would always arrive on the scene. I didn’t care how many cars were idling behind me, I would keep scooping change (and mostly bills) out of the bucket, shoveling everything onto the front seat beside me.
Those were the good old days!
By the way, the hacks have announced that the toll booths themselves will be demolished by Nov. 22. They just didn’t say what year.