Tokens

I’d just sat down for the graveyard shift in the booth at 68th and Lex, with this Little Old Italian clerk working next to me.  I’d never seen him before.  Aside from opening the door for me, he wasn’t very friendly.

I had this weird feeling that I should do a “proper relief.”  That’s basically an inventory of everything in the booth. “Don’t worry,” the little man said to me, “the guy before you just did one. It’s fine.”

Against the man’s objections, I counted 70 boxes of tokens, each holding 1,000.  I did notice, though, that the spare booth key was missing. 

“It was gone when I got here,” the little man said.

I was about to hit the EBCS button—Emergency Booth Communication System—to connect me to a supervisor at HQ—when the little man grabbed my hand.

“Don’t worry, I’m here with you!” the little man shouted, flustered.  “No one will bother us.”

I hit it anyway—I wanted that lock changed. 

A supervisor showed up a few minutes later. 

The old man was tapping his foot and twiddling his thumbs.  He shifted in his seat, started sweating, said the booth was hot, and he wanted to go out and get air.  But he couldn’t because the supervisor was there.

Just at that moment, one of 68th and Lex’s regular clerks, who I’d never met before, came down into the station.  He was wearing plain clothes.  He stopped dead in his tracks when he saw his boss standing there.  He played it cool for a couple minutes, until this other guy in tattered clothes came down and shouted, “What is taking so long?”

That supervisor knew right then what was going on.  The Italian man had given the booth key to the guys earlier so that they could open the door on me when he stepped out to “get air.”  It was a setup for them to scheme the MTA out of 70,000 tokens and make it look like negligence—like I didn’t lock the door or I’d let a stranger into the booth.  And if my intuition hadn’t told me to do a “proper relief,” they’d have gotten away with it, too.  I hear what they tried that night is a pretty common occurrence.  

Either way, they got fired.  And I got a raise.