Big Third Cousin

Remember frantically fumbling for coins
inside, under and around your seat, as you held up traffic in the exact-change
lane at the Turnpike tollbooths? In a pathetically
transparent attempt to cooerce people into using the $27.50 automatic-deduction
transponders
in
the FastLane program, officials of the Mass Turnpike have removed all
exact-change lanes, leaving two options: FastLane or human tolltakers.  Guess
which line takes forever. Guess who else thinks this stinks.

”They’re forcing you to make a decision you should make
freely,” says the ubiquitous Alan Dershowitz, a stalwart against creeping
transponderism. ”It’s not Big Brother yet,” he says, ”but it’s Big
Third Cousin.”

I’m really gonna miss those exact change baskets.One
time, some of my coins missed and fell to the pavement. I put my minvan
in reverse and carefully backed up to where they lay. Opening the door
to the van, I leanded down to pick them up, taking my foot off the
brake in the process.  The van started slowly backward. The
open door snagged on a steel post and peeled back like the lid on a sardine
can. The Cambridge Youth Soccer team I was transporting at the time thought
it was hilarious.

related
Sam Allis column in
the Boston Globe