[00:03.61]A Place to Stand
[00:05.00]If you have ever gone through a toll booth,
[00:09.82]you know that your relationship to the person
[00:11.78]in the booth is not the most intimate you'll ever have.
[00:14.38]It is one of life's frequent non-encounters:
[00:17.88]You hand over some money; you might get change;
[00:21.00]you drive off. I have been through every one of
[00:24.59]the 17 toll booths on the Oakland-San Francisco Bay Bridge
[00:28.30]on thousands of occasions,
[00:29.92]and never had an exchange worth remembering with anybody.
[00:33.51]Late one morning in 1984,
[00:36.03]headed for lunch in San Francisco,
[00:38.00]I drove toward one of the booths.
[00:40.71]I heard loud music. It sounded like a party,
[00:43.86]or a Michael Jackson concert. I looked around.
[00:47.37] No other cars with their windows open.
[00:49.64]No sound trucks. I looked at the toll booth.
[00:53.05]Inside it, the man was dancing.
[00:55.09]“What are you doing?” I asked.
[00:57.88]“I'm having a party.” he said.
[00:59.83]“What about the rest of these people?”
[01:01.99]I looked over at other booths;
[01:04.06]nothing moving there.
[01:05.39]“They're not invited.”
[01:07.18]I had a dozen other questions for him,
[01:10.11]but somebody in a big hurry to get
[01:12.73]somewhere started punching his horn behind me
[01:15.12]and I drove off. But I made a note to myself:
[01:18.34]Find this guy again. There's something in his eye
[01:21.69]that says there's magic in his toll booth.
[01:23.89]Months later I did find him again,
[01:26.78]still with the loud music, still having a party.
[01:29.57]Again I asked:“What are you doing?”
[01:32.16]He said:“I remember you from the last time.
[01:34.98]I'm still dancing. I'm having the same party.”
[01:38.12]I said:“Look. What about the rest of the people?”
[01:41.10]He said:“Stop. What do those look like to you?”
[01:45.29]He pointed down the row of toll booths.
[01:47.76]“They look like tool booths.”
[01:49.75]“No imagination!”
[01:52.22]I said:“Okay, I give up.
[01:54.86]What do they look like to you?”
[01:56.54]He said:“Vertical coffins.”
[01:58.93]“What are you talking about?”
[02:00.63]“I can prove it. At 8:30 every morning,
[02:03.10]live people get in. Then they die for eight hours.
[02:06.85]At 4:30, like Lazarus from the dead,
[02:09.90]they reemerge and go home. For eight hours,
[02:13.20]brain is on hold, dead on the job.
[02:16.07]Going through the motions.”
[02:17.82]I was amazed. This guy had developed a philosophy,
[02:22.18]a mythology about his job.
[02:24.62]I could not help asking the next question:
[02:27.30]“Why is it different for you?
[02:29.02]You're having a good time.”
[02:30.87]He looked at me. “I knew you were going to ask that, ”he said.
[02:34.47]“I'm going to be a dancer someday.”
[02:36.47]He pointed to the administration building.
[02:38.92]“My bosses are in there,
[02:40.58]and they're paying for my training.”
[02:42.27]Sixteen people dead on the job, and the seventeenth,
[02:45.85]in precisely the same situation,
[02:47.93]figures out a way to live. That man was having a party
[02:51.29]where you and I would probably not last three days.
[02:54.30]The boredom! He and I did have lunch later,
[02:58.16]and he said:“I don't understand
[02:59.78]why anybody would think my job is boring.
[03:01.81]I have a corner office, glass on all sides.
[03:04.70]I can see the Golden Gate, San Francisco,
[03:07.92]the Berkeley hills;
[03:09.38]half the Western world vacations here
[03:11.14]and I just stroll in every day and practice dancing.”
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