teknomage

I fueled up this morning at the worlds slowest gas station. I arrived at the station at 8:27 and parked behind two cars that were at the pumps and waited for their owners to come and drive them away. I continued to wait for a good 5 minutes or more before they finally came out of the store. Pulling up to the pump, I proceeded to fill my tank up at $1.11/L ($36 for 3/4 of a tank). I then went into the store myself to pay for my gas and get a coffee. Behind the counter, was the slowest individual I have ever seen. And Ive seen slow motion replays of hockey games. He would take the money, press the keys one at a time, with a 2 or 3 second pause between each number. Then open the cash drawer, place the bills into the drawer, stare at them a bit, then proceed to slowly count out change. If he had been a younger man, I would have possibly thought he was stoned and finding some sort of drug induced beauty in the cash register, but this man, who appeared to be in his early 40s, did not strike me as the type to indulge. The process was no faster for credit card transactions. After it was done, he would then take the receipt and lay it out delicately in a pile on the side, completely ignoring the next customer for the next half a minute until everything was once again perfect, and then move on to the next. One of his fellow employees, who I think was actually supposed to be leaving, finally came over and helped out, running through 4 people in the time it took this guy to do 1.

This ordeal over, I decide to get my coffee, but some dude with extremely long dreadlocks has beaten me to the coffee counter where he is in the process of explaining the 10 different coffees that he is ordering. I am not joking/exagerating btw about it being 10 coffees. And this is the Express counter at the gas station. Directly across the street is a full blown Tim Hortons where they have a half dozen people behind the counter, ready to serve. This is the run in and grab a quick cup counter at the gas station. Well now it has become the fill this guys order of 10 coffees and 3 bags of donuts and I wait again. I half expected them to say to me Can you wait 5 minutes, we have to make a new pot. or something just to make it complete, but they apparently had enough to give me my 1 cup I requested.

I finally made it back to my car, sat down and started the engine. The green glow of the LEDs on my clock blinked cheerfully at me 8:46. Roughly 15 minutes to fill my tank, pay for my gas and get a cup of coffee. A process that should have taken under 5 minutes to accomplish. Needless to say, I didnt get to the office on time. Though, if you consider that I started work at 6:30am when I got a call from our support center to track down a network outage, I was actually early.