Either she or I fell into a time warp today...

[elfs]

This afternoon, as Yamaraashi-chan and I waited for the gasoline pump to register that my tank was full, a woman in the next aisle asked me the oddest question. I had keyed in my card and all that, and was just standing there with my arms crossed, watching the cost go up with every second. She had pulled in a bright, clean Chrysler sedan and was staring at the pumps, looking confused, and then she leaned into my aisle and said, "Excuse me?"

"Yes?" I said.

"Which of these gasolines are unleaded? It says 'Use unleaded gasoline only.'"

I must have blinked a few times. What a strange question; it was like something out of the 1980s. I said, "They're all unleaded now. It hasn't been legal to sell leaded gasoline in this state for at least a decade."

She explained something about how her husband always took care of the car and this was her daughter's car and she didn't know anything about filling up the tank. But it was just so very strange.

Comments

[velvet-wood.livejournal.com]

I didn't put gas in a car until I was 26. My mother didn't get her license (so went nowhere alone, and in my family pumping gas is def. 'a guy thing')so didn't pump gas until... well, about the same time, so she was close to 47. My grandmother, as far as I know, never filled her own gastank. She either went to the full service station and just said "Take care of things," or had her husband or one of her sons do it. So there's three of us who, for a long time, had no clue about such things. Partially this was because gasoline fumes would trigger serious respiratory problems in us (I seemed to have outgrew it, my mother just lives with it, and my grandmother wasn't about to risk it, as hers could be life-threatening) but I do sympathize with the woman, none-the-less.