Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Getting robbed at the petrol pump

Now, conventionally there are two ways in which you get robbed at the pump. The first is when the oil prices are high, and you end up paying a lot to fill up your tank. The other is when you pull up to an unmanned pump (in the US, say) and someone pulls a gun on you.

I found a third way to get robbed and, sadly, it happened to me twice during my stay in Pune. Basically when the pump operator is beginning to pump petrol, he resets the counter. Now I have no proof of this but I am quite certain that twice so far, the operator failed to reset the pump. This means that when I look up after he's finished pumping, and see that he has pumped Rs.100 in petrol, he has pumped less (usually Rs. 50 less, since that's usually the amount the previous customer paid). If you don't pay attention to the resetting of the counter, then you won't catch this. You don't realize you've been robbed till you drive away from the pump and see the needle of your fuel gage. Or much later, when your tank is empty but you realize that you haven't driven for that long. It drives me nuts because the operator can't be working alone since he doesn't collect the money. And it's not just him and the cashier since there's no clear way for the two of them to keep track of how much they're robbing in one day. So the whole station is in on it and so you can't just complain to the owner. I just have to be more careful I guess.

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