ESL

As I'm sure you know (as most of you should be frequents by now) we have prepay at night at our gas station. You pay, then pump.

This evening, I announced over the intercom that prepaying inside was necessary...

But there was a big van blocking the large window by the till, so I could not see who was comming from where...

An elderly Japanese lady came into the store, and politely says "$20"... with dollar pronounced "dough-lah" in cute little old asian lady voice.

I ask "pump 5? or pump 7?"

she nods and says "yes, yes"

I turn directly to pointing

"pump 5?" in the direction of pump five

"or pump 7?" in the direction of pump 7...

She nods and puts a $20 bill on the table...

I go for it, and put $20 onto pump 7 and tell her to pump away...

She smiles and leaves... nothing is amiss as I clear pump 7 to start pumping (please keep in mind that the van is still in the way)

the gas finishes pumping, and an elderly man walks in to inform me that he wanted to put more gas in, and that pump 7 had stopped at $20 and he was unable to get it to start again... and that the elderly lady at pump 5 was obviously having trouble getting her pump started as well...

Ahahahaha... so now I'm left with $20 of gas that is paid for and pumped by seperate people, and a person who wants more than $20 of gas, but has to pay for a transaction that, for all intents and purposes, has already been completed...

All while I have 20 people in the store, lines up with slurpees and doritos (on special for $1.78 including tax)

Joy!!!

My second story is a bit shorter...

An asian man comes in, asks to prepay for $30 gas, and pays on his credit card...

This is al fine and dandy until he goes back out to his car...

You see, rather than pumping his gas, like he should have, he realized his gas tank was on the opposing side, so he moved around to another pump...

this is very bad because:

1) pre-paying is pump specific and we are not able to switch funds from one pump to the other easily

2) transferring funds from one pump to another involves cancelling one transaction and initiating another transaction

3) Cancelling a credit card transaction requires a customer signature and deposits funds directly back onto the credit card

4) Initiating a new transaction requires the new transaction to be paid for, most likely by the same credit card used to cancel the former transaction...

Do we see the bind I was in...

And there were huge numbers of people in the store...

Oh well... who can you do... I mean what...