Why are you telling me?

Chris went back up to New York today, taking the Chinatown bus as is his wont. To get there we take the Harbor tunnel and end up at the travel plaza. Today we were passing this bridge, or overpass, I haven't paid that much attention, right before the toll booths, and we saw a man standing on the side of the bridge.

He had a large, stuffed to the brim, backpack and had climbed up onto the wall, no car in sight, and was standing on the edge, looking towards the sun, shading his eyes. He certainly didn't look like he worked there so we decided to tell the person at the tollbooth what was going on. We didn't know if he was suicidal, preparing to blow up the bridge, was a daredevil, or had some legitimate reason to be there but we figured if we alerted the toll booth attendant she could tell us if he was meant to be there and take some action if he wasn't meant to be there.

The only problem is that she didn't want to know. When Chris told her she mumbled something and finally said, "The police will take care of it." Chris asked if she was going to call the police and she said no, we should do that. He pointed out we didn't have a phone and as we were about to drive through a tunnel and were on a major highway didn't really have a hope of getting to a phone. She said we needed to find a phone and report it if we wanted it reported. I was starting to look round because sometimes there are police cars parked at the tollbooths but then a man with some kind of badge came into her booth and when Chris told him that a man had climbed up onto the side of the bridge with a backpack he said he would notify someone.

It was so damn weird though. She was almost violent in her apathy, her refusal to do anything at all about it. I'm sure they've got some kind of alarm they can sound in their booths, how hard would it have been to just pass the problem along to someone else? Very queer and disturbing.