Gas Pains

I was on my way to a meeting yesterday when I stopped to refuel my sled. I pulled up to the pump, payed at the pump* , and noticed the woman next to me waiting in her Mini Cooper* while her gas pumped. After a few moments I hear the sound of gas pouring out of her tank onto the ground. Being the kind of person that would prefer that gas isn’t just poured into the stormsewers, and not wanting to be engulfed in a fiery explosion, I used my exceptional quickness to spring over to the other side of the pump to turn off her nozzle. After stopping her pump I see the woman looking at me from her mirror. She seems to be wondering why I am operating her pump, but she’s too entrenched in her phone call to do anything with any urgency. She eventually gets out of her car, if you can call it that, and I tell her that her tank was overflowing onto the ground so I stopped the pump. She actually say, "Oh, thanks. I thought I heard something spilling." She was very lucky that I didn’t have a lighter or some matches on me, because I would have happily fashioned the pump into a flamethrower and done us all a favor. Now, I can tell she wants nothing more than to get in her car and drive away, so I say, "You should let them [station employees] know what happened. They may need to clean it up." She sheepishly agrees, goes inside, and returns with the station manager. The manager quickly assesses the situation and signals for one of his employees to start cleaning up the gas spill. Here’s the kicker; the woman begins pestering the manager for some sort of refund because she doesn’t want to pay for the gas that was spilled on the ground. The manager, correctly, rebuts, "That’s why you’re supposed to be outside the car while the gas is pumping." I can, somewhat, understand sitting in the car to pump your gas if it is very, very cold, but it wasn’t, and I can’t think of any justification for asking for a refund for gas you spilled on the ground because you were sitting in your car. At this point the woman decides the pump must be broken and starts to get really belligerent with the manager, once again, if only I had a lighter all of this could have been avoided. The manager eventually just threw his hand up in the air (mine would have had one digit standing tall) and went back into the store, and the woman turns to me and says, "can you believe that?" I gave her the "you’re an idiot" glare, got in my car, and drove away.

On a semi-related note, why does the speed of gas pumps have to correlate to the price of gas? The higher the price goes, the slower the pump works. Someone needs to study this and release one of those stupid reports that says something like, "The average American will spend an astounding 27 hours extra time at the gas pump this year because pumps aren’t set to work at their maximum efficiency. This time equates to $3.2 trillion in lost productivity." Why can’t they put a "fill up" button on the pump that I can hit after I put in my card? The button would tell the pump that I’m filling up to the brim, and I would like to get the job done in Nascar pit crew times. If they can change 4 tires, get the driver a refreshing beverage, wash the windshield, take a few turns out of the front end, and fill up the tank with gas cans in 15 seconds, then it shouldn’t take me 5 minutes to pump 15 gallons. In addition to getting back all that lost productivity, those greedy, record profit collecting, gas companies could serve more customers in less time. Have you ever passed by a gas station because all the pumps were full? I do all the time, but I might not if I knew people would cycle through quickly. Then again, this idea would have enabled the previously mentioned dunderhead to spill even more gas on the ground.

* Is there any other way to buy gas? I won’t stop at stations that don’t have pay at the pump, c’mon, it’s 2006, get with it.

* The Mini Cooper is the most ridiculous vehicle since the American Motors Eagle, even dumber than the Pontiac Aztec, or that stupid electric car GM made in the early 90’s. O.K. maybe it’s not as dumb as the electric car, but the Mini is very, very lame nonetheless. First of all, if you’re a man and you find yourself at the helm of one of these things the odds are good that, a) your favorite adult beverage is a pink champagne cocktail, and b) you’re on your way to Webster Place to see Brokeback Mountain …again. Women that drive these things strike me as being too pretentious to drive a VW Beetle. Where I’m from we have another name for cars like the Mini … we call them go-karts.