DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

I believe in the value of a full systems purge: no solid food for couple days, for example, or a fresh OS install onto clean disks. Sometimes, starting from scratch gets you to a place that you can’t have gotten to otherwise.

Of course this philosophy doesn’t work so well with my motorcycle. I made it downtown before the engine died completely, as I determined with a sinking (and decelerating) feeling that probably I hadn’t put any gas in the tank in a few weeks. Damn.

So I trudged down the block toward the gas station, to run into a friend who’d seen me walking (uncharacteristically) with my helmet in hand. He offered to accompany me to the filling station, which is the same as a gas station but 50 years older.

I’m not a graduate of Dale Carnegie’s fine courses in how to win friends and manipulate people, so I asked a question whose answer, I could have predicted, would be “no.” I asked, “Do you have a gas can I could borrow?” This is a pointless question, because these folks sell gas cans. Sure, they could “loan” me one, for $15, and I’d get to keep the can at the end.

Anyway, true to form, the guy says “no.” I was momentarily flummoxed, searching for my next tack. But my friend leapt into the breach and handily rescued me — he pointed at the clerk’s nearly-empty Nantucket Nectar bottle and said, “Can we have that bottle?” The guy was so shocked at my friend’s brash request that he agreed. He hadn’t even finished drinking it.

We rinsed the bottle, dried it as best we could, and filled it with $.16 worth of gas. I’m pretty sure it’s illegal for a filling station to sell gas in non-approved containers, but once the bottle had been filled, the safest course for the clerk was clearly to let us take it, get it off the premises as quickly as possible and hope we didn’t get hit by a car before we crossed the property line.

This story feels like it needs an ending, but nothing much else happened.