I just had the longest gas station visit ever. Longer than the time I filled up my dad's F-450, which holds approximately one million gallons of diesel gasoline. Longer than the time some Chinese friends were taking me somewhere, possibly dinner, and pulled into a gas station en route, but waited to get out of the car until they had a rapid-fire conversation in which the only English words, repeated several times each, were "gas" and "petrol." (I eventually interrupted with the answer to the question I couldn't technically understand they were asking.) Today I spent at least 45 minutes at the Arco on Washington and La Cienega (you know the one) and came away with just under four gallons of gas, a somewhat cleaner car, and a real appreciation for the evenness of my temper. Truly I am a paragon of patience. But that's not the interesting part.
I think everything that could have gone wrong, short of someone actually detonating the underground reservoir of gasoline, did. In my hurry to get a spot at a pump in a wildly crowded gas station (at not quite four o'clock on a Friday afternoon--never underestimate Angelenos' passion for getting out of Los Angeles on a weekend, and doing it early), I first managed to pull in on the wrong side, and then immediately get trapped there. Since I failed to realize my mistake until after I'd fed cash into the machine (non-Californians: this is the Arco chain's great allure: they only take cash or debit, and their gas is accordingly the cheapest around), I went inside to use the bathroom and then stand in line to get my money back. It took a couple of tries to make myself understood to the clerk--he first attempted to just cancel the transaction and hand me a receipt, until I reminded him that I would want the cash as well. (This would prove to be an accurate glimpse of all my ensuing interactions with the clerks: cheerful, quick to help, and never quite useful on the first try.)
I returned to my car and waited until the vehicle in front of me left, and then waited some more until I could execute a three-point turn and get my car lined up the right way. I repeated the cash-in-machine procedure and started pumping--only to discover that this pump had a trigger more temperamental than a woman as portrayed on a men's rights subreddit. With a great deal of finessing and squeezing of the trigger at various experimental angles (that's what she said), I coaxed 3.87 gallons of gas out of the pump and decided to call it good. The key to good patience is knowing when to give up and get your change.
Unless getting your change is an even more temper-taxing activity than getting the gas was. I made it to the front of the line again, and was informed, by the same clerk, that he could see I'd put $60 in, but that the register wouldn't calculate my change. There ensued a conference between himself and his colleague, and then a call was placed to some mysterious central entity which, they assured me, had the power to authorize giving me change from my $15.05 expenditure. (They could see on their register, you see, both how much I'd put in and how much I'd purchased in gas, but remained unable to proffer me the balance, because ... Well. For several excellent reasons, I'm sure.) The central entity proved ... elusive. Several other customers got their own change and left while I stood, waiting, reading a novel on my phone. (Aunt Sara's mantra: "Always bring a book. You never know when you'll have to wait." Indeed, Aunt Sara, indeed.) Finally I mentioned I'd purchased a car wash as well, and they quickly produced a car wash ticket for me to use while I waited.
Very well; I pulled into the car wash. I punched the code in, pulled forward when signaled and stopped when same. And I waited. And waited. And nothing happened. I tried backing up a smidge; the car wash signaled me forward again. I complied and ... nothing. I tried pulling forward a skosh; the car wash ordered me back. I complied again, ever willing to accommodate, ever hopeful. The car wash indicated I was once again in the correct position and then ... did nothing. After a few minutes more of just sitting patiently--after all, the wash was on, it was communicating with me, surely ... But no. Nothing happened. I pulled out just as dirty and unsatisfied as I'd pulled in (that's what ... he said?).
I parked and went back inside. The second clerk still had the phone to his ear; the central entity, on which all of my hopes for change rested, still had not been reached. I explained my new predicament and the clerks, neither apparently struck by the unlikelihood of so many of their machines refusing me service all at once, promptly dispatched the clerk not on hold to manually switch on the car wash, if I would only be so kind as to pull around again. I did--and wonder of wonders, the wash turned on.
By the time I'd completed my second trip through the wash, either the mysterious central authority had been reached or the clerk had given up and decided to venture out on his own authority (in which case I can only applaud his bravery and good business instinct). He called me around to the side of the counter and gave me a receipt and my $24 dollars in change.
If that immediately strikes you as wrong, congratulations, you probably did exceedingly well on math word problems in school, and also have a general idea of what car washes cost at a discount shop like Arco. Yes, as I verified on my calculator app, $24 dollars was what I'd spent already; the change owed me came to $36. Alas, the harried clerk had already turned back to his line of waiting customers and was deaf to my murmurs of correction.
I am a middle-class white woman and a natural introvert; my first instinct is always to wait quietly to be noticed and helped. Today, however, I calculated the odds of anyone in the line having spent half the time at this gas station that I already had--and decided to yell. I caught his attention with satisfying alacrity and pointed out the mistake.
Upon examining my receipt he readily admitted the error, and asked me to return the $24 he'd already given me so he could give me the correct $36. Friends, have you ever watched any sort of TV special on how grifting is done? One of the classics (or so I'm told, ahem) is the old "I don't have quite the correct change but if you give me a little more money we can work it out just right" bit. I suggested, with perhaps rather a dry tone, that he might instead just hand me $12 more dollars. After several moments of careful reflection, he agreed that such a solution just might work.
And thus finally, after such a succession of minor follies and unlikely failures as I have never before heard of in one gas station visit, I made my escape, fully reimbursed, partially gassed up and moderately clean. But again, that's not the interesting part.
The interesting part, for my money (so to speak), is my reaction to all this, viz., to reflect that if my apartment had not burned to the ground in my absence I would be genuinely disappointed. (I estimated the recovery time from said disappointment to be brief, but still.) You see, I come from a very religious family, and one that has developed a distinctly charismatic bent in the last decade or so, despite our long and active association with the Churches of Christ, a decidedly non-charismatic non-denomination. I knew what my mother's reaction to such an afternoon would be: that these kinds of delays, especially such an unlikely succession of them, were a signal to me that, for some reason, I needed to wait that day, either to practice my patience or because I needed to be delayed, for a specific reason known clearly to God and possibly to be revealed to me, should such revelation serve to build my faith. For those of you out on the world wide web, that probably sounds either comfortingly affirming or a little bit nuts.
Myself, I confess I'm ambivalent. Obviously my instinct is to look for a divine reason for unlikely interruptions in the stream of my life; and yet simultaneously to laugh off the likelihood of a broken gas pump functioning as the hand of God, to my personal profit (but not the profit of the hundreds of thousands of people who do die in accidents and catastrophes around the world each year). I'm stuck straddling the divide between belief and skepticism, willing to relinquish neither one nor the other, always attempting to find the wise and sane balance between the two. I do believe; help my unbelief! And yet I notice wolves' teeth in some of these sheep's mouths.
You'll all be glad to know I found my apartment entirely unharmed (whew). But meanwhile, I must confess, something odd did happen on my way home. En route to Whole Foods to pick up the unsweetened coconut chips I couldn't find at Trader Joe's (you guys, seriously, this cleanse has completely changed my grocery shopping personality. I'm so SoCal now I could gag), I found myself behind the car of an old friend with whom I had a falling out about a year and a half ago. The reasons for the rift were ultimately flattering to neither party, and for my own part I've spent the ensuing time torn between nostalgia for the close friendship we shared for years and hurt at how she handled the disagreement. I miss her dearly. I don't know how to trust her again. But as I sat there, blinking in surprise, behind that distinctive vanity plate, I thought, seriously, what are the odds? I had thought, based on a half-overheard snippet of conversation, that she'd moved away from the area. Even knowing I'd moved within walking distance of her old place, I never thought I'd actually run into her. But ... there she was.
And on the spur of the moment, I decided not to turn into Whole Foods. I decided to keep going--and follow her. (Note to self: add "briefly stalk an ex-friend" to the bucket list.) I wanted to see if she really was headed for her old, or possibly current, apartment. I might have wanted, on some level, to give her a chance to recognize my car; after all, once upon a time, she was the friend who spent a whole day in Torrance with me shopping and haggling for it. (How do you not miss a friend who's willing to do that, and with unflagging good cheer, as I remember it.) I wanted ... to see if there was a reason I was seeing her.
Of course, logically, if she's still living half a mile away from me (and she is, apparently), sooner or later I was probably going to spot her somewhere. Sooner or later I'll probably run into her in person. Today's encounter is, arguably, unremarkable, even inevitable. And yet, and yet. If I'd picked another pump at the station; if the clerks had had a stronger grasp of basic math; if I hadn't had to go through the car wash twice: I wouldn't have recognized a familiar license plate today. And I wonder: what does it mean? Or does it mean anything at all? I'm not sure I know. All I do know is ... I'm never going to the Arco on Washington and La Cienega again.
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