ninanevermore

Today on my drive into work, I was thinking about a phone call I once answered at the county agency that I used to work at from a woman who made a very big mistake one Valentine's Day.

The agency I worked for managed the toll road system in the Houston area. The most popular way of paying to drive on the toll road is via a transponder unit stuck to the windshield of your vehicle that deducts the toll fee from a debit account that you set up with the county. In Houston, this device is called an EZ Tag.

I did not work in the EZ Tag store, I worked upstairs in another department. But at one time the EZ Tag store was so busy and so understaffed that they would "lend" employees from other departments to work in it and help answer the phones, which rang non stop. I was on loan to the tag store on this particular day. Nowadays, when you call the EZ Tag store in Houston, you are very likely to get a human being who can help you. This was not always true. You used to get stuck in a voicemail loop until an operator became available, and you might have to be on the phone for an hour or more before you reached anyone. Whenever I answered the phone, the first thing people would say was, "Oh my God, is this a real person?"

The caller I remember was a woman who had received a notice that her car had been "violating" the EZ Tag lanes. For several months, a red light had gone off each time she drove through, flashing the words, "Call the Tag Store!" She hadn't.

"I have an EZ Tag," she said.

I looked up her information. "Ma'am," I told her, "That account is closed. The tag has been reported stolen."

She sighed. "I know, but it's not stolen. I still have it, I've always had it. It's my tag."

She explained that her boyfriend had gotten the tag for her and had set up the account using his credit card to pay for it. He had been paying for her toll road fees for more than a year. Occasionally the light would flash when the account balance got low, but he would always take care of matters within a day or so.

"But we got into an argument on Valentine's Day," she said. "I had dinner with another guy, and my boyfriend got mad at me."

"Imagine that," I said.

"It wasn't anything bad," she said, "It was all perfectly innocent. I figured we would work it out as soon as he started talking to me again."

Looking at the account history, which was in her now ex-boyfriend's name, I could see that on February 15th of that year, he had come into the EZ Tag store, reported the tag stolen and requested that the account be closed. Because he was not returning the EZ Tag, he forfeited his deposit. In the time since, his girlfriend racked up some $600 in missed tolls and violation fees. She was willing to pay the missed tolls, but wanted the fees waived.

"It wasn't my fault," she said.

"Didn't you see the light flashing everytime you drove on the toll road for the last two months?" I asked.

"Yeah, but I just ignored them. I figured he would straighten it out."

"I think he straightened it out, all right. I believe the county's position is that if you were ignoring the lights, they consider that you were given fair warning."

She whined and begged and cajoled. I finally promised her that I would pass her message along to the manager of the Tag store, because I couldn't help her.

The manager, a very sweet woman named Kay, looked at the message and groaned when I brought it to her and explained the situation.

"We've talked to this lady before," Kay said, "And we told her 'no' then. She still owes us $600."

She shook her head and frowned at the message in her hand.

"What an idiot," she said.

I agreed with Kay, but I've always felt a grudging admiration for the boyfriend. If I had been single, I might have made a note of his phone number when I had his account pulled up and given him a call. How often do you find a man willing to pay for your toll road fees so long as you just avoid going out on dates with other people? From what I could tell, he seemed like an upstanding guy.