I received this notification/bill via snailmail on Monday.
My first inclination was to ignore it,
because one of the trendier scams these days is a smishing thing: text (often
from some foreign country’s area code) announcing that you owe a road toll and
you can pay it by clicking here.
Yeah, no.
Look, I haven’t been on a toll road for
so many years that VA EZPass deactivated my account (while still holding on to
my $25 minimum; I need to get on them about that). So I knew I hadn’t incurred
any tolls on 22 January. Besides—this was for a tunnel in…Hampton Roads? That’s 182 miles
from me.
Well, I searched for DriveERT on the web,
and there is indeed such an entity. So I rang them Tuesday morning. Waited on
hold for 30 minutes (God bless speaker phone) and got their front-line help.
Which basically consists of: we photographed
the license plate, so how do you want to pay? I kept insisting that my car has not been outside of
Fairfax and Loudoun counties for well over a year, she sighed, asked me if I
own a GMC truck (no) and transferred me to their second-line support.
It took Dee (or maybe it’s D—I’m okay with
public support people using a pseudonym, as long as I have something I can
reference when I document the interaction) about 35 seconds to see that somehow
in their process they’d transposed two of the characters in the plate they
photographed, and she transferred the toll to the owner of that vehicle.
She got a kick out of me saying that if it
turns out that my car is travelling more than I am, I’m going to be upset. “It
went to Hampton Roads and didn’t even bring me back a tee-shirt?”
Between that and getting all my 2024 tax
info to the accountant, Tuesday was a good day.
©2025 Bas Bleu
No comments:
Post a Comment