A Trip to the Service Station

by Vanessa Dante (Sept - 2016)

I don’t mind going to the service station. It’s one of the few public places I can go where I’m not the center of attention... where I don’t have every one staring at me all the time. That’s because everyone’s staring at my car instead. A pink Ferrari with Playboy bunny ears on the windows and a personalized license plate that says I♥TRBNG.

Of course these days service stations don’t usually provide much in the way of service. I mean it’s not like on Back to the Future where you have a bunch of uniformed guys running out to give your car a spit polish and a massage. These days you have to pour the petrol yourself and of course as soon as you pick up a dispenser a splash of petrol spills out onto your clothes, because the person before you didn’t give it a shake before they replaced it. Considering how expensive petrol is these days you’d think people would make sure they got every last drop they possibly could.

Saying that though, I guess when you really think about it, petrol is the cheapest liquid you can buy at the service station. In New Zealand we pay around $1.80 NZD per litre of petrol. Now if you want milk from a service station it’s going to cost you around 2 NZD per litre.

What? Milk costs more to buy than petrol? How can that be when petrol comes from fossil fuels, which is shipped in from overseas and milk comes from cows, of which there are more in New Zealand than there are humans! Something just literally doesn’t add up here.

But that’s not the worst! What if you want to buy a litre of water from a service station? That’s 3 NZD per litre! WTF? Is this some kind of a sick joke? In a country that gets way too much rain, we get charged that much? That’s almost double the price of a litre of petrol! It's no wonder the Chinese are draining all our water and making millions by selling it overseas! They'll be better off than the oil companies!

Something is completely messed up here. My head is spinning. I just hope they never start selling Bourbon at a service station. Imagine how much you’d be paying for that! $80 per litre? I guess we better stick to using fossil fuels. It’s the way more economical option.

Ok, time to pay my bill and drive out of here. Oh no, is that creepy looking guy at the pump next to me staring at my butt? I guess he's not into Ferraris. Sigh.