TollBoothGuy
5 Years Experience
Brooklyn, NY
Male, 33
I spent just short of five years as a toll collector on the western end of New York State. Ask me anything, but please don't pay me in pennies.
Standard bureaucratic wait time. It's been about eight years since I've taken it so you'll have to forgive my memory, but If I recall correctly it takes about six weeks to recieve the results in the mail.
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It's pretty easy to do. Just take a look at the side of any vehicle and count the number of wheels rolling on the ground. Here's a chart from the U.S. DOT that shows some examples of truck combinations: http://i.imgur.com/r6hpwt9.gif We did not have cash registers in our booths. The ticket machines that we used could do a number of functions, but all cash transactions were done manually. If you needed to, you could bring a calculator of your own out to the lane with you, but during my job interview I was asked if i could make change without the use of a cash register. When I replied that I could, the interviewer tested me on the spot.
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It's going to vary from agency to agency. In my case, I took the civil service test in January and was called in for an interview in July. If they are hiring a class of collectors from a test, they run down the list based on test scores, so in theory the better you score, the sooner you might be able to expect an interview. Once I was hired, I spent one day getting my fingerprints taken, background checked and going through classroom training at headquarters and two days training in the field with another collector. After that, I was a bona-fide part-time toll collector.
That being said, some of my co-workers were hired without taking the test because it wasn't being offered at the time. They were allowed to start working immediately and were required to take the test when it was next offered.
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Nothing complicated here. There were crosswalks behind the booths spanning the toll lanes. If there's a car in the lane, we are taught to make visual contact with both the driver and the collector manning the lane. When we've ensured that it is safe to cross, we do so.
Sorry that this answer doesn't include something about a complex set of tunnels. There's an OSHA video out there somewhere that manages to make this even less interesting.
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The exam that I took had three sections. The first was vehicle classification, consisting of pictures of a variety of combinations. Tolls often vary by type of vehicle, and collectors are audited, so being able to classify and charge the appropriate toll is critical to the job. The second section consisted of adding up money that was printed on the page. (Which I found substantially more difficult than actually having real money in front of me to pick up and count.) The third section consisted of totaling up deposit slips.
I'm sure different exams vary from agency to agency.
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Without getting on the Toll Collector Batphone to speak to that particular collector, it's really difficult for me to offer an answer here. Nothing that you describe seems to warrant logging your license plate number but without being there it's really impossible for me to say. Different agencies have different rules and the circumstances that I described in the answer to your original question only speak for the agency that I worked for.
I will say this- collectors don't really enjoy getting out of the booth and filling out extra forms, so I am going to wager a guess that he was required to take down your license plate number, whatever the reason might be.
Sometimes I got out of the booth first and took the plate number of the vehicle before I started the transaction, but I typically explained what I was doing as I was completing the exchange. If you asked him why he was taking down your plate number, and you didn't receive a satisfactory answer, then that's just some plain old bad customer service.
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