The Price is Right

Because Illinois does not tax us enough, they are constantly thinking "out of the box" for ways to collect new revenue. They are one creative bunch, I tell you! One of the brilliant ideas they came up with is to collect tolls on freeways every 500 feet.



To make things easier for us commoners, making it possible for us to travel the roads without pocketfuls of coins, for a mere $50.00, we can purchase a little box that looks like this:


After plunking down the 50 big ones for possession, then you have to load up your account with money. After this, you are free to travel the roads without stopping because everytime you pass a toll booth, the magic air waves sense that you have this magic little money box in your car and it deducts the said toll magically from your account. (If you don't have said box, you can wait in line to pay with coinage---but it will cost you DOUBLE what it costs those with the magic boxes.)

Matthew uses the magic box quite a bit with his work excursions. A few weeks ago, he used a rental car for about 10 days because his car had a little crash into the back of a semi truck and had to be repaired.

He forgot to remove his magic box from the car before leaving it for repairs. Not remembering his rental car didn't have the magic box, he drove through many toll booths without paying for the tolls.

There is repentance for those of us that drive through toll booths without paying. We can go on-line and pay our missed tolls. If this is NOT done in a timely manner, instead of only paying the 40 cent toll, you get to pay an additional $20.00 to help you remember better the next time.

However, as with everything in this state, it is easier said than done. When you go on-line to pay the missed tolls, you have to choose the exact name of the toll booth you missed, (they all have names), the amount of the toll (they are all different ranging in increments of 15 cents to $1.00), the freeway you were on, the direction you were heading AND the time of day, within 15 minutes.

Well.....when we turned the rental car in, Matthew confessed to me that he probably went through about 10 tolls without paying for them. (He's busy and thinking about other things and all....) Knowing what I know about car rentals, if you miss a toll and don't pay for it, the rental car company not only charges you the state's fee, but they also have their own little fee of about $50 for each missed toll.

SOOOO, taking all of the above into account, I envisioned paying around $1,000 in Illinois tolls. Total awesomeness!

I decided to call the tollway authorities and try to work something out. I knew the days we rented the car and the make, model and license plate number of the car we rented. I called and was able to futher ponder my situation for about 15 minutes while I was on hold.

Finally, I talked to a pleasant gentleman. He first tried to get out of looking anything up by telling me there was no way to figure it all out. I asked him again to try to look up the tolls by looking up the license plate number. He finally acquisesced and looked it up.

He then asked me how much I wanted to pay. "How much do I want to pay?" I asked confused. "Yes."

Not wanting to underpay, I said, "Ten dollars." after which he replied, "Too much."

"Too much?" I questioned.
"Yup. Too much."
"That's okay," I replied, "I just want to make sure I take care of it all."

"You can't pay that much. Give me another number."
"Another number? Okay. $5.50."

"Another number."

"$9.25."

"Too high."

Now I'm really confused....."Can't you just tell me what I owe?"
"No."
"No???? Why not? I just want to pay the tolls."

"Because you don't own the car I can't tell you how much it is."

"You're kidding me....okay....um...how does $7.85 sound?"

"Too high and it has to be in round numbers."

"7.00."
"Lower."
"5.50."
"Lower ."
"50 cents."
"Higher."

I then told him I felt like I was on the Price is Right. So I went into Price is Right mode.

"$1.00." "Higher." "$1.25." "Higher." "$1.30." "Higher." "$4.50." "Lower." $4.00." Lower.....

Finally, I hit upon the magic number at $2.50. Then I asked him if there might be other tolls that haven't come through yet. "Yep."

Great. I get to play Price is Right with another Toll Authority dude next week. Yeah me!!