Em (wife) and I pulled into a gas station in my car. While I was there, I decided to put some air into the tires while I got gas. (evidently each gas pump had an air hose with it) By the time I got out to start doing the air, there was a Mexican guy who worked for the gas station, and he had already started on checking my tires and putting air in them if they needed it. I was a bit perturbed that he had just started going it without asking me, so I got the other air hose for that pump, and started doing the air myself, just as if he weren't even there.
I unscrewed the valve cover for the front driver's side tire, and put air into it. Even though I didn't check the pressure, I knew that it was okay. Then I went around to do the passenger-side front tire. After I did that one, I acted like I was trying to screw the valve cap onto Em's window to make her giggle. After she giggled, I put it on the tire where it belonged. The Mexican guy was doing the air in the back tires, so I didn't mess with them.
Then after I put the valve cover back on the driver's side tire (for some reason I hadn't replaced it when I finished it, but took it with me to do the passenger side) I got the gas nozzle, put it into my car, and then I got out my check card to put into the gas pump. For some reason there were two conflicting images on the gas pump for how to put the card in. There was a picture of a guy on there, just like there are at the Bank of America ATMs, showing which way the card needed to face. But then there was an image showing where the magnetic strip needed to go. Unfortunately, to follow the one for the strip made it so that I had to turn my card around differently from the picture of the guy on there.
I figured that the strip was what mattered, so I put it in the way that was correct for the strip. It immediately spit my card back out. "That's odd...", I thought, and I tried it again. This time it would barely even start letting my card in before spitting it back out. (kind of like when a dollar doesn't work on a vending machine, and it only goes in a half an inch before stopping and coming back out) I tried it another time or two, and then I looked at the text display. It told me that I needed to go in and talk to Kim, and only Kim, about getting my card working there again.
So I told Em what was going on, and then I went inside. The store was long and narrow, and I came in on the right hand side of the store. The cashier was up at the end of the counter to my far left. It was kind of dark in there because there was all sorts of shelving full of stuff for sale in front of the windows. I was at the end of the line. (there were about 4 people ahead of me)
Somehow, even though I was 20 feet away, I was able to see a name tag that said that Kim, the large older blond lady behind the cash register, was the manager. She had on a white sweater, and her hair was fairly short with big curls, and she had big glasses. There was a shorter and younger woman to her left who had short dark hair, and a somewhat large, but nice, nose. She looked about a year or two older than me. She asked me if she could help me out, and I told her that the gas pump told me to come see Kim and only Kim to get the pump to accept my card again. She said that she could do it, and I told her again what the gas pump said. Kim told her it would be okay for her to do it, so after the other customers were gone, Kim left, and this dark haired woman went up to the cash register.
I gave her my card,, and she told me that she needed my ID, so I gave her some other foldable card, kind of like my insurance card. She took it and started to fill out a half-sheet of thin yellow paper, kind of like the carbon-copy sheets that they give you at Fry's when you bring something in for their service department to check out. At that point, I took a seat in the bench-seat in front of the cash register. I turned to my right and slid back so that my feet were up in front of me and I was facing towards the end of the store I had just come in.
She was hard at work filling out this paper, but she was still talking every so often. She mentioned something about being a lawyer. I said something along the lines of, "Wow, being a lawyer must not be paying very well if you're working here, too.", and she nodded and said, "Yeah, that's about it." Then she was saying something about how there's so many lawyers in the area already, and that they were just all so nice. It jogged my memory of stuff from up north, and because we were in Texas, I was going to say something about some sort of stupid case I had heard about from up north in Maryland or something about people suing for stupid reasons, like because they had gotten stung by a wasp or something.
While I was thinking this, I was leaned back in the seat supported by my hands behind me, and I was pushing myself down the seat an inch or two, an the pulling my self back. I was kind of sliding back and forth, and I noticed that that time that I was wearing my work uniform for Mercedes. Anyway I think I decided otherwise on mentioning the stupid case, and just said, "yeah, it seems that the farther north you go, the worse the lawyers get," and she agreed. Finally she was done filling out the paperwork, and just as I was getting ready to head back out to the car, I woke up.
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