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Indiana wants me -- Lord I can’t go back there.

One of the problems with attending a Notre Dame football game, and there are few, is that if you live in Wisconsin, you have to drive through Chicago and part of Indiana to get to there. From our house in Southeast Wisconsin it’s about a 3 ½ hour drive to the Notre Dame campus in South Bend, Indiana. My husband attends every home game of the season. I usually tag along to a couple of games each year. So I can tell you in no uncertain terms that the Indiana Toll Road system has changed over the years from an efficient, user-friendly system that once housed real people in its toll booths, who actually used to smile at you and say hello, to a sluggish, inefficient, worthless pile of crap.

When I first started attending Notre Dame football games back in 1990, I was impressed with the Indiana toll booth operators who personally handed you a ticket and told you to have a nice day. It was a stark contrast between the impersonal, nay, hostile treatment you got from the Illinois toll booth operators, where the employees took your money, grunted if you were lucky, and handed you your change without even looking up. After leaving Illinois, we would cruise into Indiana where the cheerful Indiana toll booth ticket-giver/taker was the first glint of the great weekend that lay ahead -- a symbol of hope, like the first robin of spring or the first step onto the yellow brick road to the Land Of Oz.

I’m sad to report that, alas, the flying monkeys have torn the Indiana Toll Road system to shreds like a helpless scarecrow.

I don’t know what happened to the people, they’re gone. Now only empty toll booths stand guard at the on and off ramps to Highway 90, and an automated machine now spits out your ticket.

And, of course, there is no one to take your money anymore, either, when you are done using the freeway. But instead of a basket to throw your coins into, the toll road managers have opted, instead, to place a tiny slot on the side of the toll booth in which to deposit your loose change. We discovered, as we drove the toll road back to our hotel after the Notre Dame-Boston College game, that this cumbersome way of collecting money can cause quite a traffic backup of people precariously slipping one nickel after another into the coin slot, as if they were paying their entire grocery bill in change at the self service check-out at Wal-Mart.

After watching several toll-payers ahead of us clamber for change, attempt to deposit their coins one at a time, only to have several coins fall to the pavement and have to start over, we began to swear. Because we knew it didn’t have to be this way. We had seen the tollway in its glory days, pumping cars through like a conveyor belt at the U.S. Mint during a stimulus package. Now, it operated more like an outdoor self-service dry cleaner that only takes change; a dry cleaner with four pick-up windows with three of them closed.

It was late. And dark. With several cars still ahead of us digging for change in their seat cushions and traffic backing up for miles behind us, I told my husband to illegally drive through the I-Zoom lane. But because he had already inadvertently done that in Chicago earlier in the day, and once the previous weekend, he refused.

Finally it was our turn to put our handful of coins in the slot.. We could feel hundreds of eyes on us as my husband fumbled for his shekels. When we were finally finished, we noticed that the gate seemed to have a generous delay programmed into it. While I screamed at the gate to open, my husband, being a man of few words, stuck his arm out the window as far as he could and flipped the machine the bird.

“Take that!” he said, satisfied at his social commentary.

I can’t be sure, but I like to think that the Indiana toll booth cameras get hundreds of strikingly similar photos every day.