Gas Problems
Lately I’ve been travelling a lot for work and have been renting a car when I drive to avoid racking up miles on my lease.
So far it’s been smooth sailing, but today I encountered a situation that left me wanting to punch a baby seal in its cute, smug face.
I rent my cars from Avis, which is located at the MBS Airport. Typically renting at an airport would be a major pain in the ass, but thankfully MBS is the size of a mid-sized High School so it’s a quick in and out.
As I’m just about to pull into the airport to return the car (note the time: 5:45 p.m.) I’m talking to Amanda on the phone and let out a good healthy yell.
“I forgot to fill up the tank.”
The first time I rented a car, I fell for their dirty tricks:
“Sir, would you like to pre-pay for gas. It’s only $4.09 a gallon.”
I had gone by 7-Eleven that morning and gas was like $4.05 so I figured, “what the hell, it’ll save me the trouble.”
The only thing I didn’t know was that they’ll charge you for a full tank of gas, even in the event you only used half of it. So they charged me for like $55 worth of gas when it would have taken $25 to fill it. The nerve.
So now I’ve been filling them myself, only just as I’m pulling into the airport I realize I forgot to fill it. That gets us back to the “SHIT!” part.
Half-tempted to just let them charge me a little extra to fill it, I reluctantly drive through the terminal and back out onto the road and head into Freeland to get gas. This angers me somewhat, since somehow the town of Freeland is as busy as Los Angeles around 5:45 p.m. and all the gas stations were built by idiots who picked stupid locations for gas stations. I head to Marathon on the corner that has all of four pumps, all of which are currently occupied. I wait a few minutes and then pull in.
I get out of the car and go around to the side of the car to pump gas. I reach my hand out to get at the gas cap when I realize that it’s one of those new fan-dangled cars with the release that you have to trigger in the car. You know, the kind they put in so kind strangers don’t fill your tank up for you while you’re at work.
I walk back around to the driver’s side door and look around for the button or latch or whatever the hell it is. In fact, I don’t know the proper name for it so I’ll just call it the gas cap flap flipper.
The gas cap flap flipper is not on the door. I look around the dash.
I look around the console. The shifter. The steering wheel. I even popped the trunk and looked in there.
By this point the guy running the gas station is probably looking outside wondering what the hell I’m doing. He’s probably afraid of me doing the ole pump and run except I’m not pumping. And by the looks of my XXL shirt, he could probably tell I wasn’t running either.
After a good five minutes - I kid you not - I throw my hands up in the air, yell out the word that got me into this in the first place and hop back into the car. I’ll just let them charge me a couple extra bucks for gas.
I drive back to MBS. By now it’s 6:10 p.m. I note the mileage and walk into the airport and to the Avis desk. A sweet old woman greets me and I ask her for a pen to write down my mileage. At this point, she informs me she doesn’t know where any pens are. I grab a sharpie instead and write down my miles. I inform her that the person who designed my car was a shit stick and hid the gas cap flap flipper somewhere where I couldn’t find it, and I apologize but I’m returning the car with a half tank.
Given my extensive training in customer service, I expected her to say something along the lines of, “Sir, I’m terribly sorry that you were unable to locate that. Since you’ve rented a dozen cars in the last week, let me waive that charge and take care of that for you.”
“Oh, that’s not good. It’s like $9 a gallon if we fill it up. You sure you want to do that?”
I know they say that in airports you aren’t supposed to leave anything on the ground, but I’m pretty sure I shit myself right there at the Avis counter.
I reiterate again that I - a self-proclaimed genius - wasn’t able to find the gas cap flap flipper and ask how I was supposed to pump gas. She laughs and says, “Yeah, people always tell me that can’t find it on that car. Honestly, I don’t know where it is either.”
At that moment, I left a companion on the floor for the first shit I took.
Around the corner comes some blonde kid - I’ll call him Junior Douche - who offers to come show me where it is. As we walk to the car, he talks about how warm it is outside and how he just wants to get the hell out of work so he can drive his truck around. He has a truck. It takes racing fuel or some stupid thing. He tells me it’s $250 to fill up the tank and offers to fill up my tank if I’ll fill up his. He laughs at his own stupid joke and then mentions his truck three more times.
He opens the car and searches for the gas cap flap flipper. He can’t find it either. He looks around for another minute or so and then lifts up the floor mat.
There’s the gas cap flap flipper.
My mind immediately goes to some factory line where a few union workers are at the end of their shift. Their sole job on this earth is to properly install the gas cap flap flipper in a spot easily locatable to all of mankind. They realize they’d end up working a few minutes too long so instead look at each other with shit-eating-grins and then say, “Let’s just stick it someplace else.” They look around and then jam it into the floor and hide it under a floor mat.
Then Junior Douche gets out of the car and walks around to the other side. He snickers that he wants to show me where the gas cap flap is since I have such a hard time finding gas-related things. I momentarily consider putting my foot in his gas-related ass. He mentions his truck and then walks back in.
I then drive back down the 405 and back into Freeland. Cars are lined up at every pump. I turn left and drive down the block a ways and fill up at some other gas station that doesn’t even have an inside. Just a guy in a porta-john sized booth surrounded by cigarettes and watching TV-5 on a 12 inch TV.
By the time I head back to MBS, it’s nearly 6:45 p.m. I walk back in and hand the keys to Junior Douche. He asks if I found the gas cap flap flipper.
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