Saturday, April 10, 2010

It just ain’t right.

Things that shouldn’t ought to happen:

  1. Any Utah Legislator getting re-elected.
  2. Arby’s running out of roast beef
  3. Chevron running out of gas.


chevron And yet #1 happens all the time, #2 happened to me once back when I was living in West Valley and #3 happened tonight.

Technically we didn’t actually run out of gas, but one tank got so low that the pumps were giving up after only pumping 30 cents or so.   Of course, at the time all I knew was that the regular tank was reading only 234 gallons, which isn’t enough for the pumps to work.  And you have no idea how irritated people get when you tell them your gas station just ran out of gas.  (Actually, the majority were really good about it, even found some humor in it.)  The GM came down and messed around with things and finally got them running again, and I learned a few things in the process.

Like; did you know that there is no such thing as mid grade gasoline?  There’s just regular and premium. Mid grade is made by mixing regular and premium straight from the tanks at the gas station.

So, we have 3 tanks.  2 are regular and 1 is premium.  The regular tanks are supposed to switch back and forth, whenever one gets a couple hundred gallons lower than the other, it switches over to the fuller tank.  Our problem was that they weren’t switching.  We had 234 gallons in one, and 7356 gallons in the other, but it kept pumping from the lower one, and not doing a very good job of it.  So, just like anyone who has ever worked on a PC knows, sometimes the only thing to do is turn the whole thing off, let sit for a minute, and then start it all up again.  Seems to have worked, because when I left things were still working fine.sartin

Go figure.

4 comments:

A Paperback Writer said...

I had no idea you could reboot a gas station. wow.

Jannx said...

Hello Max. I like the new look on your blog.

A Paperback Writer said...

I'd tried to send you a happy birthday e-mail today, but my school e-mail was being very slow so I'm not sure it got there.
Happy birthday anyway.

Max Sartin said...

Thanks - yeah, I did get it, right in the middle of 1st period. I was going to send a quick "Thanks", but I got sidetracked by one (or more) of my 40 students and spaced it after that. But, thanks! It was great to have that show up bright and early.