If you have ever gone through a toll
booth, you know that your relationship to the person in
the booth is not the most intimate you'll ever have. It
is one of life's frequent nonencounters: You hand over
some money; you might get change; you drive off.
Late
one morning in 1984, headed for lunch in San Francisco,
I drove toward a booth. I heard loud music. It sounded
like a party. I looked around. No other cars with their
windows open. No sound trucks. I looked at the toll booth.
Inside it, the man was dancing.
"What
are you doing?" I asked.
"I'm having a party," he said.
"What
about the rest of the people?" I looked at the other toll
booths.
He
said, "What do those look like to you?" He pointed down
the row of toll booths.
"They
look like...toll booths. What do they look like to you?"
He
said, "Vertical coffins. At 8:30 every morning, live people
get in. Then they die for eight hours. At 4:30, like Lazarus
from the dead, they reemerge and go home. For eight hours,
brain is on hold, dead on the job. Going through the motions."
I was amazed. This guy had developed
a philosophy, a mythology about his job. Sixteen people
dead on the job, and the seventeenth, in precisely the
same situation, figures out a way to live. I could not
help asking the next question: "Why is it different for
you? You're having a good time."
He
looked at me. "I knew you were going to ask that. I don't
understand why anybody would think my job is boring. I
have a corner office, glass on all sides. I can see the
Golden Gate, San Francisco, and the Berkeley hills. Half
the Western world vacations here...and I just stroll in
every day and practice dancing."
Peace.