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.
Technically, no. We are not a currency exchange but the agency I worked at did accept Canadian currency for toll payment at a variable rate that they set. In my five years at the agency, the discount rate varied from 10-30%. This meant that a patron paying a toll with Canadian currency might be credited with as little as 70 cents for every dollar tendered.
So yes, you can pay a toll with Canadian money, but the international exchange rate will not be taken into consideration. Additionally, I cannot speak for agencies further south of where I worked but I would imagine the farther south you go, the less likely Canadian currency will be accepted.
A collector might exchange the Canadian money for you, but be cautious of the rate it is discounted at.
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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 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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HR Executive
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Hotel Employee
What was the craziest request you ever got from a guest?
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I HAVE NO IDEA
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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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The starting pay is certainly more fair now than it was when I started at 9 and change, and the scheduled raises are a nice thing to count on. If collectors make themselves available across the board it isn't terribly difficult to reach the 70 hour bonus mark, especially during the summer months. I guess the downside to this arrangement is that your earning potential really plateaus after the five-year mark. Whether overall compensation is fair is to up to each employee, coupled with the economic demographics of a very large state. I will say that I, along with many other part-time collectors, worked multiple part-time jobs while I was employed as a collector.
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