Toll board member's pique good for us all

Steven Harris is my new hero.

Harris, a board member of the Illinois State Toll Highway Authority, did an everyman rave out at Thursday's meeting that provided great insight - and ultimately some answers - into the tollway bureaucracy.

He recently had an occasion to call the tollway's customer service center. Confusion and frustration followed.

As Robert Sanchez chronicles elsewhere on dailyherald.com, Harris was just about done updating credit card information to the clerk on the phone. Then, needing only to provide part of his driver's license number, along came a computer crash. He was told he'd have to call back and start the process all over again.

That seemed like an unnecessary amount of repetitive work to Harris, who suggested that the clerk just jot down the license number on a slip of paper, enter it in the system when it came back up. Nope, the clerk said, employees aren't allowed to have paper and pens in the call center.

Harris wondered: What the heck was that all about?

Being a toll board member, he wasn't shy about taking his query upstairs. He attempted to contact the tollway's acting director (the toll authority has been without a permanent director for six months, though that's a whole 'nuther story), but discovered he was on a two-week vacation. The second-in-command? She quit.

Harris, the former mayor of Deerfield, was additionally miffed at not hearing about the vacations and the resignation. He could have kicked some butt behind the scene, tried to clout his way past the clerk slamming the door in his face. But, instead, he did what a good public official ought to do: He raised some Cain at the toll board meeting - a public meeting regularly attended by the press and public - on behalf of all of us who have been put on hold for great lengths of time, been thwarted by oblique and bureaucratic rules or stymied by unhelpful customer service people.

"If I can't get a hold of somebody - and don't even know who to call, frankly - you would wonder about our customers and other people that don't have the kind of access I do to the executive suite," he said in Sanchez's story.

Sanchez asked Harris after the meeting if he was happy with the answers he had gotten. Harris wasn't completely mollified. "I'm not sure that there was an explanation," he said.

It should be noted one bit of confusion was cleared up: the lack of writing materials in the call center. That's a security matter; toll officials don't want workers jotting down customers' personal information. "Frankly," Harris said, "I would have stopped my inquiry had that message been relayed."

Anyway, Sanchez is not the regular beat reporter for the toll authority. He was filling in for our transportation writer, Marni Pyke, who is on a special assignment that I'd love to tell you about, but it's a secret. (Yeah, I know; the newspaper bureaucracy's kind of annoying too.)

So, Sanchez played back the Harris rave-out, admitted that he thought the whole thing might be somewhat "inside baseball."

Nah, I told him, people will relate to Harris' tale. Write it up just like you told it to me, I suggested.

So there you have it. Certainly not the most important story in the world, but a nice little slice of life.

And if you disagree with me, call our customer service department. Just kidding, of course.