Job 7: Fill it up, regular

In the 1980s modern man met yet another technological milestone. The labors of centuries of scientific exploration and discovery had come to fruition. Man had invented the self serve gas pump. People from all walks of life, regardless of race, creed or color, could pump their own gasoline. No longer would the superstitions of the past be a barrier to modern man's desire to pump his own gasoline.

In the town of Huntington, Long Island, fear and prejudice still had a strangle hold on the gas service industry. The wealthy and elite felt gas pumping was beneath them. They were comfortable with the current state of gas delivery, and they wished to continue having their gas pumped for them. They believed it was ingrained in the very fiber of our society that immigrants and potheads should pump gasoline. They had reached a certain stature, by either hard work or inheritance, and they were concerned that, by pumping their own gasoline, they would be tearing apart the very foundation of our society. In retrospect, they were probably right.

In the mid to late 80s the Huntington town council passed an ordinance that made the self service of gasoline illegal. Claiming the dangers of self service, and the desire to protect the common citizen, they deemed self service a hazard, and banned it for ever (or at least for a few years). Hence began my career as a gas station attendant.

I worked for Northville Gas Station on Jericho Turnpike just a mile or so from our house. I wore a pale blue uniform that was basically a big baggy jump suit that was worn over street clothes. They had huge pockets in which you kept money for making change. There were no cash registers, and the office contained an old candy machine that remained mostly empty except for a few packs of old Wrigley spearmint gum and some peanut brittle. There was a dirty old desk that held an even older transiter radio that was tuned to the popular rock radio station of the time. I'm pretty sure half of the music the station played was Stairway to Heaven. The floor had a huge metal plate with a hole in the middle that covered a drop safe where attendants made drops of cash in two hundred dollar increments. The pumps were the old mechanical kind, no fancy digital displays. The prices and gallons rolled by one at a time, "clunk...clunk". Credit cards were swiped on mechanical machines where the attendant filled in the pertinent info. We were asked to tear the carbons in half, because customers feared criminal types sorting through the trash to recover credit card numbers. I don't think anyone could match up the two severed halfs of a carbon and decifer the credit card numbers. Unless, of course, they were some kind of criminal mastermind.

I liked pumping gas. People would tip you on occasion, and you had no boss to speak of. The gas station owner would come by every couple of days to make sure everything was in order and to pick up money from the safe. As long as your drops matched what was read on the meter, you were okay. It could get pretty bad when it rained or snowed. You'd be standing in the rain, eating a pizza slice because it was so busy that you didn't have time for lunch, and a big cadillac would pull up and have you check every fluid in their car. "Can you check my tire pressure too," they would ask, as you're slice dripped with rain and transmission fluid. "Be sure you don't fill it over twenty dollars," they'd say, a moment after the pump read twenty-one thirty-five. They'd spend the next five minutes complaining as a line of cars built up behind them. You'd charge them twenty, and you'd take flack from the boss because your drop was off, but it was better than cramming the pump in their mouth and filling them up to twenty-two dollars. Well, its almost better. Then they would tip you quarter. I'd find myself saying, "Thank you sir, have a nice day." What a gas whore.