Det var bare en jobb å få endene til å møtes.

     It was just a job to make ends meet ... but back many years ago I worked for a local cooperative. Seemed like everybody, in town and out of town, had worked for it one time or another. It was a good place to work; one of those small town “Where the Customer Is The Company,” kind of places where you could apply your farm-learned skills ‘back in the shop’ during the winter if they kept you on, or learn a thing or two about something you didn’t know or ever thought you’d ever do, like engine work for instance. 

    I couldn’t believe that to adjust valves in a fertilizer truck’s gas engine a person had to tighten the nuts on the lifters as the engine was running and spewing oil! Unbelievable! These videos were not available back then to make it much easier: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIfZmC_KwGg
Or this one, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5EGlb_VpTAw

    As a city guy, I was totally out of my element back then, but it seemed it didn’t matter. They'd teach you what you needed to know. I was 28, older than my co-workers, and almost as old as my supervisors. One of the guys that worked part-time after school, was fifteen but looked like he was ten. He swore like a trucker and talked a mile-a-minute too, but still was a really likeable guy. His dad used to race snowmobiles for the local toy factory, when that brand was king. The son rode ‘snow cats’ flat-out everywhere he went too. You never saw him going slow.

    One time I saw him hit a road-crossing at high speed and fly high into the air, his sled continuing a long distance without him. Just as he crashed to earth, he jumped up unhurt, swearing for all he was worth, then threw his helmet --"Just like his old man," they said."Just like his old man."

    Twenty-four hour gas pumps had just come into fashion a few years later. If you qualified as a customer you could get a card to activate the pumps 24/7. I had stayed in town one night after work to do some shopping and had come by the station to fill up on gas. There were few people around that part of town that time of night, when from the door of the VFW, a man staggered across the street angling north north-westerly, when he stopped and slapped his forehead as though he suddenly remembered something.

     Making an abrupt turn to the west in the middle of Main Street, he walked up to the ‘Cardtrol Gas Pump Activation’ terminal on the corner of the building. Removing his wallet, he looked toward the pump he wanted, and activated the pump --with no car standing anywhere near it. Satisfied, he put his card back in his wallet, and walked north -- toward the American Legion (maybe where he had left his car). The pump soon shut off without pumping an ounce. I could've got some free gas!

    I used to work at the gas station up town on Thursday nights when all the stores uptown were open late. All the office personnel went home at the regular time, so it was just me pumping gas until close-up. One night the fuel truck drove in an hour or so before closing. The driver opened the manhole covers on the underground tanks and slid the hose from his tanker truck into it to start the process. There was a drive-up customer at the pumps filling jerry cans and his car.

    Three or four guys were talking near the cash register, as I helped a customer with his merchandise. The tanker driver walked in to join the conversation. I didn’t think a thing about it; he was a local man. He was soon home himself, I probably thought. This was his last stop. 

    The customer that had been pumping his own gas came into get something else and said, casually,
     “I don’t want to panic you, but you have gasoline coming out of the bottom of your pumps ...”

    The tanker driver ran from the building; the underground tanks were overflowing. He immediately shut off his truck pump, pulled the hose from the tank and quickly drove his rig away-- never to come back that night.

    I was speechless. I didn’t know what to do. Gasoline poured out from under the pump cabinets. I thought there might be a valve or something I could shut off.  I didn’t panic; there would be time for that later. I ran to the back shop where I knew somebody else would be, like the manager’s son for instance. But after seeing what had happened, even though he was intimately knowledgeable about the station and worked at the station that his dad managed for years on end, he chose to leave too. The mechanic shook his head and said he had to leave to take a customer home, but he’d be back ...

    In retrospect I should have called the fire department or the cops. Instead, I blocked off the driveways to the pump islands so nobody could get in. My overriding concern was to prevent the gasoline to get into the storm sewers along the street, so I ran out of the building and using the company forklift, hauled a pallet of bagged floor dry to the area. Cutting the bags open, and using a push broom, I made a dam of floor dry between the lake of gasoline and the curb so it couldn’t spread onto the street. I probably used over five hundred or more pounds of the stuff.

    To his credit, the mechanic came back as he said he would; it helped that I was no longer alone in my dilemma, but he didn’t know anything more about what to do about the calamity than I did. We made an attempt to plug the vent tubes in the cabinets we saw were spraying gas, using shop rags we tore into pieces; a vain and useless effort.

    Hours later, the manager and the station manager, who had been in the Cities at a company-wide managerial meeting, arrived just as I was cleaning up the last of the floor-dry mess. I tiredly explained what had happened, gave them my keys, and clocked out.

    The next morning, I learned the station manager had opened the station before I arrived. Feeling bad about it, he told me the manager wanted to talk to me in his office. The mechanic was in the office too. Didn’t see the son.

    After abrading me for the fact the tanker driver left his truck, a serious violation of his role; and the ensuing tank overflow catastrophe; the mechanic all the while sitting silently in the background, the manager fired me, telling me to give all my keys to the station manager and leave the premises.

    I growled back, trying to defend my position in all this. I had nothing to do with those tanks over-flowing. In no way had this been my fault -- except, in hindsight, I should’ve called the fire department immediately. Had I brought city officials into the fray, the tanker driver would’ve lost his job as well; a good old boy, he skated. It came to light that after someone on day shift measured the tanks, someone else read the chart incorrectly; instead of the tanks being 3/4ths empty, they were 3/4ths full.