slow? do you think i'm slow, buddy?

last night, as i raced off to babysitting, i noticed my car was running low on gas. (this is nothing new- i generally wait until the needle's firmly on "e" before i give in and pump the equivalent of two cds into my gas tank.) since i was already running a bit late, again, nothing new, i didn't have time to fill up on the way. i had enough gas to get me to my destination, but the return trip was going to be iffy.

which is how i wound up driving home at 1:30 in the morning chanting "just one more mile, just one more mile, just one more mile....". (and you thought i was merely singing along to the wang chung song on the radio. HA! had you fooled.....although that chant does fit nicely with the beat of "dance hall days")

my route home took me past one of the cheapest gas stations in town ($2.68/gallon, as compared to the $2.91/gallon around the corner from my apartment complex), and my needle was past "e", so i figured it would be wise to stop.

now, pay at the pump is a fine and baeutiful thing, but only if you happen to be holding plastic....which i wasn't. (i just finished paying off my credit card for the first time since college, and i haven't activated the new card yet.) fortunately, for once i had some cash with me (thanks to babysitting).....well, it would have been fortunate had i been able to actually use it.

the subject of my current ire: the unhelpful gas station employee who wouldn't sell me gas at one frickin' thirty in the morning.

yeah- you read that right- gas. not beer, wine, or hard liquor, as the guy in front of me was foolishly trying to purchase on a sunday (blue laws are alive and well in south carolina, folks)- but freaking gas!!!!

even worse was his excuse:
"the pumps are too slow."

excuse me, buddy, but i don't care if your pumps are slow. my car's going to be really slow- like to the point of not able to move unassisted- if i don't get some gas into it. so, i think i can put up with a "slow pump", because even if it takes and hour to pump a measly ten gallons into my tank, that still beats triple a's response time when i have to call them for a tow because i ran out of gas because you wouldn't let me get gas because your pump was "too slow". (oh, the searches i'm going to wind up on now...."sump pumps", here i come....and i'm sure that's the cleanest i can hope for.)

then, to make matters even worse, this goober looks over the counter at me and says, "i'm sorry, but what can i do?"

let me tell you what you can do:

take your head out of your ass and let me buy some freaking gas so i don't wind up stranded on the side of the road in what inevitably will be the absolute worst part of town at one frickin' thirty in the morning, where i will probably get abducted and taken away to the big city where i'll wind up pimped out just to earn my abductors enough cash to support their various drug habits because, let's face it, to some cokehead, i probably look like i'm some naive high school student, and therefore an easy target, and then i'll wind up on one of those annoying little cards they stick in the mail where my photo is side by side with my abductor's, which is realyl quite pointless because who actually looks at those cards anyway? NO ONE, because, like me, just about everyone tosses it into the recycle pile without really looking at it to see if maybe one of the people pictured is their next door neighbor or cousin or something because, quite frankly, the ten seconds it would take to actually read the thing are far better spent leafing through the new frederick's of hollywood catalog that arrived in today's mail and hey, wait a minute- does that new push-up bra come in my size?

but i digress....and all because you wouldn't sell me gas because your pump was "slow".

somehow, i doubt the pump was the problem.....which is why i walked back to my car, turned the key, and chanted my way to the hess station half a mile down the road.