Ha ha, serves them right

WRTV Indianapolis reports that a Shell gas station in Plainfield, Indiana accidentally set the price on their pumps to $0.002/gallon, allowing several drivers to fill up their gas tanks for just a few pennies.

One guy even came back with all his truck-driving buddies to take advantage of the unexpected bargain. Them trucks got big tanks, and since they were paying at the pump with a credit card, nobody working at the station noticed the unusually low price.

Until some goody two-shoes customer decided to go inside and tell the cashier exactly what was going on. This is the real story here! I mean what half-assed moron would actually draw the gas station's attention to the error?

You know that kid in seventh grade who'd jump up and down, hand in the air, exclaiming, "Teacher! Teacher! Peter is drawing a crude picture of you and Nancy is passing notes around! Over here! Teacher!!!"

This was her, all growed up now. She must be so proud of herself.

Come on. This isn't the case of handing a cashier a $10 bill, getting change back for $20, noticing the error, and handing her back the difference so it doesn't come out of her minimum-wage pay cheque. This is a gas station. They're fair game. Remember when gas stations raised prices to over $5.00/gallon after Hurricane Katrina, remember?

Ever watch My Name Is Earl? That's karma, baby.

Worse than that, in this particular case it was a Shell station. Shell is responsible for environmental devastation in southeast Nigeria; paying the police and military to raid villages where protestors rallied against the destruction of farmland to build pipelines (the police killed 80 and the military killed 2000); and for bribing witnesses to testify against outspoken activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was executed.

(You do know you are implicitly supporting these activities every time you fill up at a Shell gas station, don't you?)

(Not that other oil companies fare much better in their environmental and human rights records.)

(I am not in the least bit suggesting that getting a bargain on gas prices somehow makes up for murdering thousands of innocent people. My point is trying to understand why somebody would want to help a company like that.)

The mistake was "blamed on a computer glitch" which is a common cop-out for human error. Computer programmers, manufactures, and operators (all humans) can make mistakes; but computers never do, because they are not sentient beings, and are therefore incapable of doing anything other than what they are designed, built, and instructed to do.

Blame the people, not the computers.

Anyway, it serves them right. Gas stations have been taking advantage of consumers for so long, they deserve to get bit back once in a while.

Comments

ouch! that sucks for the station owners.

i hope that it was shell that wore the blame and cost for this, not the poor people that own the station.

shell are one of the worst petrol companies out there and the fact that they have never been brought to stand for the attrocities they are responsible for (directly or in-directly) is abbominable.

history will remember them as villians.

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