The Color of Money

Last Wednesday I was in a taxi heading from home to my dear friend Bob's for a day of movie watching. The driver pulled up to the fare booth at the Rama IV-Hualumphong expressway entrance to and opened his door--a sun visor on the side window meant he couldn't roll it down--to pay the 40-baht fare with the 500 baht note I'd given him.

Fare Guy handed the driver the change. The driver shut his door and then handed me the change which was neatly folded inside a receipt. (Whenever you pay with a large denomination bill, fare guys always give you a receipt.) We started up the incline towards the expressway. "Hey wait a minute," I told the driver. "I gave him 500 baht but he's only given me three 20-baht notes in change! He owes me another 400 baht" "Yes, I saw you gave him 500 baht," agreed the driver. I felt hugely supported by that remark because Thais generally avoid taking a concrete stand on either side of an issue unless it's absolutely necessary.

Since we'd barely moved from the toll booth, the driver carefully backed up, stopped the car, talked to Fare Guy for a moment or two and returned to the taxi. He went through a series of searching-for-money motions--checking under his seat, under the car etc. even though we both knew the change had gone directly from Fare Guy's hand to the driver's to mine. By asking the driver to check around the taxi, Fare Guy was tacitly admitting he knew I'd handed him a 500 baht bill. For all the good that did.

OK, enough of this sense diddling around. I got out on the passenger side and walked toward Fare Guy's little booth doing my irate-Farang-demanding-her-change-now routine. He summarily told us to get in the car and move over to the side of the expressway next to the office, effectively putting three lanes of slowly moving vehicles between him and us. I immediately sent the very sweet and patient taxi driver back to the tollbooth for an update. After waiting patiently for five minutes, the driver returned telling me to "jai yen" (keep a cool heart).

After 15 years in Thailand, I know absolutely that staying calm is the only viable option in these sorts of powerless situations. However a cool heart is also the LAST think I tend to keep at these moments. Fortunately just then Fare Guy emerged from his booth, holding a plastic basket under one arm and crossed carefully over three lanes. He walked silently past without looking at me and went into the office. Not pleased about being left on the hot and noisy roadside, I trailed after him.

Thai officialdom specializes in constructing large spaces wherein a couple of government employees languish in air conditioned comfort behind closed doors, while a lower-grade functionary or two sit outside at a desk and pretend to care who enters inside. I barge past them into the "office." (No Thai would ever act in this manner but since I'm definitely not Thai, nobody's particularly surprised.)

Fare Guy was laboriously counting the contents of his plastic basket, shoving bundles of 500, 100, 50, and 20 baht into an automatic money counter and jotting numbers in columns on a form. He counted the loose change and the tollway vouchers. He muttered something to the other person in the room who was adding numbers on a calculator. Then Fare Guy repeated the entire process, this time changing amounts in the margins. "How much longer will this take?" I asked impatiently. "I have a plane to catch." That was a big lie but it hardly mattered because I might as well be wrapped in Harry Potter's Invisibility Cloak for all the attention it netted me. I just knew Fare Guy was trying to fritter away enough time so I'd storm out and leave him 4oo baht richer. I wasn't having it.

Finally, some 25 minutes after I first passed the 500 baht note to the taxi driver, Fare Guy put his palms together and raised his hands in front of his face in an incredibly half-hearted "wai." He muttered a barely audible "sorry" under his breath and shoved four 100-baht notes at me. I grabbed them and stormed out. He'd been guilty from the git go and deserved no thanks for not ripping me off. I've talked to about this to many taxi drivers since and none have ever seen or heard of such a blatantly dishonest tollbooth scam.