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I have kids, and a job, and a marriage, and chronic pain, and bills to pay, and disagreements with friends, and I’m an addict… but nothing quite makes my stomach tighten up like traffic tickets. Especially when I was, obviously, very, very, very not guilty, you a******s.
This is coming up for me right now because I made a long drive through Connecticut, Pennsylvania, New York and New Jersey recently. I think I went through roughly 25 EZ Pass toll lanes. I’m a driving veteran, so I know to slow down, make sure the EZ Pass is visible, all of the basics of paying tolls. As evidenced by the fact that it apparently worked 23 of the 25 times.
But I did get two violations in the mail, both for not paying the toll. They hit you for the tolls, which were only a dollar or two. Then they ding you for an administrative fee of $50. So my two toll violation bills were for $52.50 and $51.45.
I was boiling hot right away. Like the kind of pissyness that sounds funny right now but is legitimately problematic. Was I going to drink over it? No… but physical sobriety and emotional sobriety are two different things for me on many days. And if my emotional sobriety is a mess, it means I am a jerk at work, overly mean to my kids, too hard on my wife and I might not pet my cats when they try to lay beside me. As hilarious as ranting about the New Jersey transit authority might be, it’s not good for staying sober and ACTING sober.
So I appealed those two tickets online. My case was that my EZ Pass clearly works, as shown by the 23 paid tolls from that weekend. I had to do one at a time, and the first one immediately accepted my appeal and charged me $2.50. Great. I moved onto the second one.
I wrote the same appeal and it was rejected with a message that you can only wipe out one administrative appeal per year. So I still owed the $51.45.
I thought lava was going to start shooting out of my ears. How. Dare. They. I spent an hour mentally building my case. I was going to take this to court—THE SUPREME COURT IF NECESSARY—because of how unfair that rule is. I was really reaching for my rationale, too. At one point, I was working single moms and struggling truck drivers into my case for driving to New Jersey and fighting this thing.
My solution was that I mailed a check for $1.45 and said I refuse to pay the administrative fee. I wrote some holier-than-thou b******t about the principle of not listening to an appeal on something like this flies in the face of the Constitution. Yes, I dragged our Founding Fathers into this.
Well, guess what? Whoever got that letter must not have loved it. I got a note a week later from a collections agency for the full amount. I was still pretty pissed—my back literally went up, I think.
So I actually started planning to go to New Jersey and take this to court. I started cycling through whether I needed an attorney, and when I might be able to go down there for a day or two. I told my wife how annoyed I was by it and she had the perfect response.
“Uh, I get it… but I kind of don’t get it,” she said. “It is pretty aggravating to know maybe the toll booth machine malfunctioned or a bird flew in the way or whatever happened. But wouldn’t it make a lot more sense to swallow your pride a bit here and pay $51.45 instead of the $500 or so it might take to drive to New Jersey and argue about a ticket?”
She was right. I cooled down. I mailed the check, with great hostility still coursing through my veins. But I did it. Sometimes taking an L is actually a win, and that was the case here. I still think it’s pretty outrageous to have a blanket rule about something like automated toll booth violations. But I also don’t want to empty out my sober gas tank to fight it.
If you’re wondering what toll booth violations has to do with getting sober and staying sober, you might have a point. But I do think the “life on life’s terms” phrase we use applies to a wide swath of things that happen on this long road of recovery. I used to think “life on life’s terms” applied to really epic rough moments in sobriety, but I actually think it’s more relevant to those supposedly small things that drain our spirituality out of us. Those can be disputes with neighbors and lost packages and long lines at the grocery store and a guy not using his turn signal. Those are the moments where I decide they’re too small and embarrassing to discuss with a sober friend. “I can take care of this,” I tell myself. And I often do, with mixed results.
Here’s a funny kicker to that story. I had to go on another very long drive a few weeks later, and probably went through another 10 toll booths and was especially careful to make sure I didn’t get flagged for not paying one of them.
Sure enough, a few days after we got back, I get a letter from NJ EZ Pass again. I open it up and it is a toll booth violation. This time around, I had learned my lesson—sort of. I did not go online and try to appeal. I wrote a kind appeal note where I said my EZPass had been working and I had paid a lot of attention to making sure I was under the speed limit. Then I included a check for the toll, but not the $50 administrative fee, and I mailed it back.
Guess what? That check was deposited and I haven’t heard anything about the administrative fee. So being calm and gentle in responding might actually have worked. I’ll try that going forward.
I’m probably lying when I say that. It wouldn’t surprise me if it happens again that I end up wearing a suit, sitting outside a New Jersey courtroom with an entire law firm at my side, to battle to avoid paying $50. But it’s progress, not perfection, so I will keep coming back!
ALCOHOLIC/ADDICT JOKE OF THE DAY
This newsletter is a place of joy and laughter about the deadly serious business of sobriety. So, as I will often do, let me close with a joke:
OVERHEARD AT A MEETING
“I’m on a whiskey diet. I’ve already lost three days!”
(Credit: AA Grapevine, January 2005)
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