Maybe the Oil Companies Aren't all Bad

Ever notice how sometimes cool technology is sitting right there in front of your face and you wonder why you never heard about it? Well, that happened to me last week in a very unexpected place; the gas station. For Christmas, among other things, I got a $25 gift card to Marathon. On my way home from my in-laws' house, I stopped by the gas station to fill the car up.

Let me walk you through my thought process at this point. It's been a long Christmas holiday; 5 days of traveling over 300 miles to two family Christmases with my 8 months pregnant wife. The car is almost empty and I just want to get some gas in the car and get home. The main reason I'm not planning on filling it up is I'd rather not mess with trying to use both my $25 gift card (remember when that used to fill a tank up? I do; in fact I remember when I could fill my car up (a 1994 Honda Accord) for $12, because it was only 8 years ago) and my debit card.

I've actually never used two forms of payment at the pump, but I assumed that I'd have to swipe the gift card, fill up exactly the amount on it, hang up the pump, insert my debit card, and fill up the rest of the way. Since I didn't want to go through the entire interchange, I'm standing outside in the cold waiting for the entire 25 dollars worth of gas, a massive 8 gallons, to pump so I can manually shut it off.

As I'm standing there I notice the pump hit $23 and it seems to slow down a little. Barely noticeable, but I could swear it slowed down. At $24 it seemed to slow even further. I was starting to think that maybe I was just really tired and it was my imagination. As it ticked past 24.75 it seemed to slow to a trickle before finally stopping at exactly $25. Obviously these things aren't advertised well enough since they've been around for a while.

Needless to say, I was impressed. Looking back on it now, it doesn't seem nearly as cool as it did then since it would have been really nice to sit in the car the entire time and wait for it to stop by itself, but I still think it's a nice feature.

For regular readers, it's probably a little weird that I put a post like this up, since in my last post 60 Years Since it all Started I was talking about the greatest invention of the 20th century, but it just struck me as cool. Especially since it was so unexpected. Too many times nowadays it takes me less then five minutes to find a major fault about any product I buy. It was nice to be pleasantly surprised for once....

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