On my way to work yesterday, I had to stop at two gas stations to fill up my car. I first stopped at the closest Shell station. I usually try not to use this gas station because they rarely accept my American cards and have bad customer service, but today I had cash handy so I figured I would give them another chance.

I walked up to the glass door to find that it was locked. There were two cashiers and one customer inside. I waited for the customer to leave so I could enter. As the customer walked out, a cashier followed him. The door opened, customer left, I start to enter, and while speaking in Spanish the cashier starts raising his voice as he raises his hand for me to stop. So I stop and he proceeds to lock the door.

He then points me over to a drop box (where they do transactions at night so they can’t get robbed). I followed his lead and he told me to stop again with his hands. I did and looked at my watch; it was 6:05am. I stood there. A line starts to build behind me. At about 6:10am a man in the line starts to yell some obscenities, I don’t know if the cashiers could hear him through the thick glass because they never acknowledged him. At 6:16am they both got on their cell phones and I left.

I went up the street to JJ’s gas station. I also try to avoid this station because the lines can be long. Today either time or luck was on my side because I just walked in, handed the cashier a $20, told her the pump, walked to my car to pump the gas, and drove to work. On the bright side of all of this, JJ’s was something like $.04 cheaper per liter which did minimize my frustration by a fraction.