Thanks for making my trip to New York a memorable one

Memo:

To: The rude and abusive New York City Transit police officer of Asian descent stationed at the Whitestone Bridge toll plaza going into the city this morning.

From: Doug Hester, ordinary peasant who made a simple lane mistake while entering your little fiefdom, and who was verbally abused for his grievous error by Your Highness for quite some time before you deigned to help resolve the situation, which resulted in the process taking far longer than it should have, and as such delayed the many other motorists behind the poor confused soul even more from reaching their destinations.

Subject: Your conduct today.



You know, there’s times when ordinarily intelligent and responsible citizens will make trivial errors, especially when they’re in a new and unfamiliar area and unused to certain driving situations, like the one that involves the aforementioned toll plaza’s cash and EZpass lanes appearing quite rapidly on Route 678, forcing one to make a split-second decision while attempting to safely navigate through heavy traffic.

Once the wrong choice has been made, it really doesn’t do any good to come over and berate the driver sitting at the EZpass crossbar frantically thinking of something, anything to do about the "crisis", because they don’t really see a quick and neat outcome to the situation without any official assistance. He already knows he’s made an error, thank you very much, and he wants to speedily resolve the crisis even worse than you do.

It definitely isn’t going to pacify the honking motorists stuck behind the poor peasant to make them impatiently wait even longer while you harshly lecture the poor bumpkin about his being in the wrong lane. All the screaming in the world isn't going to change that the mistake has already been made, and it's the fixin' that now has to take place.

It gets even worse when you then demand the toll, snatching it from the driver’s hand and throwing some change back his way, and then snarlingly order that his wife count it out loud to make sure that you haven’t given out the wrong amount, and then finally stomp over to the gate and hit the override button like it's going to cause you physical pain to do so.

Nope, all that your loutish behavior really does is give the impression to those that aren’t from the area that New York City cops are rude, officious jerks who enjoy lording their pathetic little powers over the great unwashed, an impression that was sadly confirmed to be accurate by the worker at the rental car return facility a short time later.

Way to represent your city and offer good and helpful public service, sir. Keep up the good work.

It'll be a long, long time before I travel through Mayor Bloomberg's dictatorial paradise again. I'll figure out some other way to get where I'm going.