Earlier this week, we asked you for your worst gas station stories. After hearing from former attendants and unfortunate customers, I no longer worry about accidentally putting diesel in my gasoline-fueled car . I’m terrified of getting covered in gasoline. From faulty equipment to less-than-intelligent customers, it is far too easy to get covered in flammable liquid like it’s Zoolander.

Despite having a strong theme of being drenched in gasoline, the responses were each shocking in their own way. I finally understand why New Jersey and Oregon don’t trust people to pump their own gas at stations. Here are your answers.

Years ago I bought an ‘00 Saab 9-5SE V6t wagon in Oklahoma City(!) and drove it back to Maine with a friend of mine. SEVERAL hijinks ensued on that trip, but the gas station one was certainly memorable. Random smallish station off the Interstate in Bumfuck, OH, late at night. Pull up to the pump, put the nozzle in, start pumping. I remember thinking the trigger felt a little funny. Note that I was NOT using the “hold it on catch”, just squeezing the thing manually. Just as I am thinking “it must be about full” gas starts fountaining out of the car. Obviously, I let go of the nozzle. Gas does NOT stop fountaining out of the car - the thing is stuck ON! Look around for emergency shutoff - no sign of it. Sprint faster than I have ever moved before into the store. Scream at pimply-faced high school kid behind the counter to shut the pumps off. *He has no idea how*. He’s digging around under the counter for some sort of operations manual, then trying to call the owner of the station on the phone! Thankfully, while this is happening my buddy did find the shutoff on the side of the building, and the fountain has stopped. My car is now sitting in a literal lake of gasoline. We very gingerly pushed the car out of the lake.

The kid tried to get us to pay for the lake of gas - I gave him a $20 bill and told him to have the owner call me if there was going to be a further problem, and I would refer him to my attorney. Never heard a word.

That car ended up being pretty great - I guess I got all the bad karma out of the way on the trip home with it.

I was driving north of Indy with my son who was potty trained, but not well enough that he could hold it very long. Naturally, he announced that he had to pee. We were near a gas station right on the side of the road, so we pulled in. Mind you, he was of an age where he a) Pushed his pants to the floor to pee and b) Touched everything. We walked into the bathroom and it looked like Stevie Wonder and taken a whizz after drinking a case of Busch Light. Fortunately, this gas station was basically in a corn field, so we walked right back out and I just had my boy whizz into the field.

Submitted by: Midlife Miata Driver

I’d be surprised if anyone can beat this. 3 years ago while filling up my brand new 2020 Rocket 3, the fuel pump never stopped while I was refueling and my bike went up in flames while i was holding the pump.

Fortunately, I had my helmet and gloves on since I paid with my smart watch, otherwise I’d have serious permanent damage.

I still ended up with 2nd and 3rd degree burns on my arms and was out of work for 3 months while hopped up on pain meds. I still suffer from PTSD from the event. Needless to say the pandemic wasn’t the worst thing about 2020 for me.

On a positive note, I’ve got an EV car and bike so I never have to go to a gas station again.

Driving across Florida from the Gulf Coast to the Atlantic to visit a friend had me stopping for gas somewhere in the middle of nowhere. The gas station (brand not important) appeared busy and well kept from the road so we pulled in. I went into the store to grab a Dr. Pepper and then asked where was the restroom as I did not see it anywhere. I then was handed the dreaded key.

When was the last time you saw a gas station on a busy road with the classic restroom out back and accessible by key? I proceded around to the back of the building and opened the door.

Words fail to describe the scatological horror within. My fight or flight mechanism kicked in and I quickly began to survey the tree line for its acceptability. Fearing unknown central FL venomous wildlife and or arrest/citation by local law enforcement, I proceeded into the chamber of horrors.

Never again at anything less than a mega-station like Sheetz or Wawa.

I flipped my snowmobile at a gas station a couple months ago.

Stopped mid-ride to fill up, got turned around to get back on the trail. As anyone who’s ridden before knows, if there’s no snow, you have zero steering. I was aimed slightly to the right of the packed track, my right ski was going towards a deeper pile of snow. I figured it’d go right through, and I was only going about 5 mph, but turns out it was a big boulder with hard packed snow around it. Ski hit it, sled tipped over but luckily I was standing and jumped off.

No damage but I was pretty sore after having to right a 500 lb snowmobile.

This was my fault. In high school and early college I mowed around 30 yards to help pay for college and rent. I had a small Toyota truck ( still own) and a tilt-back trailer that was used for my garden tractor. This was in rural TN and in the summer it was absolutely brutal out there. So I would get an early start, get through 3-4 yards and then go to Waffle house for lunch and to cool off in the AC. Then back to the yards. On one of the last yards I realized I was almost out of gas entirely for the equipment so I went to a gas station and filled up all of the gas tanks in the equipment and the jerry cans. Get to my next yard and the garden tractor is GONE. I knew it was there at the gas station so somehow it was somewhere between the gas station and the house I had just pulled up to.

I drive back tracing my way. No tractor. My fear is that its either on the road, rolled off who knows where or somebody saw it and stole it. Get back to the gas station and its sitting there at the stall. I had forgotten to snap the lever that allowed the tilting mechanism on the trailer back into position. So I had pulled away and the tilt mech caused the tractor to roll off.

Well before dawn on my day off, I get a call from a fleet driver complaining they can’t get a van to fuel up (Ford Transit) and the credit card was locked. They spent the $100 limit on the card and the tank was still empty. They tried to fuel it again, hit the limit and now the credit card is locked. The driver was now trying to fuel it up using their personal credit card (why? - and yes, I did reimburse the driver as they only got $10/h then and gas was $4.50). In the background at that moment, I hear an attendant start yelling and the emergency shut off was hit. 30 minutes later, I am “both at and not at work” at the scene where a driver pumped about 60+ish gallons of fuel on to ground. The slope was just away from the pump for the driver not to notice as they sat in the van while it pumped onto the ground. In about 20 or so minutes of the gas spill, I had about 10+ months of work ahead of me.

It was appearent in the parking lot that someone cut the fuel filler pipe (rubber) from the filler to the tank in an effort to steal gas. However, my vehicles are stored with empty tanks at the end of the day. Refueling in the morning was critical.

Why was it “terrible” and headache?

1. The driver wasn’t doing their pre-shift safety checks. Gas was obvious spilled around if they bothered to look down. I had to do remedial training for the per-trip inspections and fueling requirements.

2. The driver was in the cab, with the vehicle running while pumping fuel onto the ground. Lucky we did not have a bigger, more explosive issue. Had to do a EHS/OSHA “near miss” training/debrief.

3. I lost a vehicle for about a week out of service as a result (Having one of four vans down in a rotation of 3 on, 1 off is an issue for small special vehicle rotations). But really, it was half-down for nearly a year. Because the “state” requires an estimate process and crime report for a “fix” of a dozen or so dollar part to be “installed”. PITA. And because it was a “gubbermint” fleet:

4. I had a 10+ month fight with the auditing folks because there was $400+ ish dollars of gas to document for because “the state” tracks mileage and fuel use, if they don’t align. Audit. You take your car, swipe, inter card’s vehicle ID number, enter mileage, etc. I had to keep both every paper receipt of every fuel up and even with the police report, had to deal with some part of the system constantly turning off the fuel car because some system flagged “incorrect” mileage. It was a constant fight because every 2-3 days, a driver was locked out from refueling. I would need to ground the vehicle every other day to try and fight for fuel just to know if the vehicle was available the NEXT day (again, our vehicle went to “bed” dry).

4b. Not only that, but because I had a “problem” account, I had an audit of all of my vehicles nearly monthly ... for all 20-70 ish vehicles (three different pools). Do you think a motor-pool user walks inside if they don’t get a receipt from the pump? Ha!

Elected officials can scam and cut deals with friend all day, but my the Lord me merciful if that fleet guy has a criminally cut fuel line to a parked vehicle and gas goes on the ground.

My worst gas station experience didn’t even happen while I was at the gas station on my day off - that then cause me to be at a gas station every other day for 10 months. Sigh.

This is 1997 and I’m 19 y/o. I went to hitchhike the Argentine Patagonia with three friends from high school years, one guy, two girls. Leaving Esquel, the girls ignored our agreement to travel in pairs, and jumped into a Chilean truck before we could stop them. With the other guy we had to wait for hours for someone to pick us, and finally drop us in a doomed place in the middle of fucking nowhere, Province of Chubut. The name of the town is Paso de los Indios.

We went to the gas station for a coffee or a meal (it was about 5pm, our last meal had been breakfast), and wait until someone takes us to Trelew, our destiny. The person at the counter told us they had no coffee, no meals, no nothing for us, despite that a few locals pointed to that very place for exactly that: coffee and a meal. The same person, while fingerpointing the door, told us that we could drink water from the fawcet outside.

We had to wait for the midnight bus, and during all of our wait we tried our luck again with the gas station, with no avail. We were only allowed to drink from a fucking fawcet. Mind you, this being the late ‘90s, there were plenty of hitchhikers travelling the Patagonia, so we were not complete aliens. And we offered to pay for everything we wanted.

Around that time, there was a movie (Caballos Salvajes) where they set this very gas station on fire. Well deserved. I wish it had been for real.

Submitted by: Argentine jalop in Central America

Was looking for work once when I was a teenager, and was consistently driving back-and-forth between Boone and Winston-Salem looking for work. Stopped at a gas station not too far from home, but still out in the sticks.

I didn’t want to stop there; it looked kinda run-down, but I was running on E. I pull into the gas station, fill it up, then proceed to go in and pay. I don’t carry cash, but of course they have debit, right?

Right! They have debit. So I hand my Visa over to the clerk who then looks at me like I’ve grown a second head.

“Sir, we only accept American Express.”

A quick look told me that, indeed, they only accepted AmEx.

“...uhhh...wait, you don’t take Visa or Mastercard?”

“Nobody uses Visa or Mastercard, everybody uses American Express.”

Which devolved into a very heated argument where I finally offered to leave my license with him so that I could go to a near-by ATM and come back with cash...to which he responded by calling the police.

Officer shows up, and after some bickering, realizes that I wasn’t trying to leave without paying and offers to drive me to the ATM. He called the guy a “fucking idiot” and was also baffled by the AmEx thing.

So we get back to the gas station, with the cop standing there to watch me pay in cash, when I hand the money to the clerk, look him dead in the eye and say, “It’s Everywhere You to Be, asshole.”

Combination of worst for the station attendants/greatest shame for me:

In college, I was on the way back to campus from the annual end-of-the-spring-semester bacchanal in Myrtle Beach. Having made a series of increasingly poor decisions over the previous ~120 hours, I was, if you will, not feeling my best. We stopped at a Hess station somewhere in eastern North Carolina, where I asked to use the restroom (to vomit and also likely leave a rancid deposit from the other end). I fully intended to also purchase something from the station, to make good on use of their facilities and to attempt to settle my stomach.

The station attendant gave me an exaggerated, not at all shy look from head to toe and back and said, “We don’t have one.” (nevermind that the conspicuously labeled “restroom key” was hanging from, I think, a level on a nail right by the register).

I went back outside, sidestepped the front door just enough that nobody would have to walk through it but close enough that someone would definitely have to see about things, and vomited copiously on the pavement in front of the station’s plate glass front window. Wiped my face with my shirt sleeve while making soul-piercing eye contact with the “we don’t have one” lady, slammed the door sourly, and off we went.

I hope her colleagues made her clean that up.

Bought a car in Malaysia (my wife is from there) car was registered in Singapore. Got to Johor Bahru and took the bus over the bridge to get the car (all the paperwork was already done) owner wasn’t there for me to get the car, but his brother gave me the papers and all the forms I needed to get it to Malaysia legally. But no one had any tools to change the plates, so I said fuck I’ll just take my chances with immigration and customs (normally a bad idea)

My father in law is a pretty high ranking official in the police force ( much like our military) and he gave me a bunch of waviers and phone numbers to call in there were problems. Surprisingly there were no problems with a blue eyed white guy bringing a foreign plated car with the Malaysian plates sitting on the passenger seat.

The problem happened when I pulled into a gas station to fuel up. Malaysia has two pumps really. One for Malaysians (lower price because their fuel is subsided) and one for everyone else. And since this was a Malaysian car nowI pulled into the Malaysian pump. Well I started pumping fuel and the attendants came out screaming at me, they hit the pump stop (which stopped the entire station from pumping) amd it set off a bunch of alarms, they then formed a chain of people (to be replaced by barriers they carried out) around the car so I couldn’t drive away.

Then about six police cars came barreling into the station with lights and sirens going. All of the cops were carrying billy clubs and all of them had them out. After about five minutes of explaining to the police what had happened with the plates and not being able to change them, the cops started to laugh a little. Even police officer apologized to me about the mix up, then the ranking officer spent the next 20 or so minutes ripping every station attendant an new asshole.

They lent me some tools and I changed my plates and I got the hell out of there.

I used to live in Charlotte and lived near the steel creek area. I would often pop over the bridge to South Carolina to get gas at that station. In north Carolina they had a section of the state taxes asking you about any purchases you made out of state. They wanted to get the sales tax you didn’t pay back. One of the questions (I think) was about fuel. I just imagine what it would have been like in the Carolinas were run by a SE Asian country.

Scariest - Walked out of the men’s room at a BP station in Virginia just in time to see the clerk behind the counter being held up by a guy wearing a mask and a Harley-Davidson jacket. Guy got his cash, ran out the door, jumped on his motorcycle and headed toward the interstate.

I don’t think he ever saw me.

Clerk calls 911, cops are there in about 5 minutes. I give my story to the officer and never hear another word about it.

Weirdest - My buddy and i are on a road trip from Atlanta to Chicago to meet up with some other friends. About 4am, we stop at a gas station in El Paso IL to fuel up and use the bathroom.

We go in the shop to get some snacks and there is no one there. We knock on the office door and get no response. We hang out for about another five minutes, finally we write down a list of the items we bought, left what we hoped would be enough cash along with our phone number and got back on the road.

Again, never heard anything back.

Submitted by: Earthbound Misfit I

I worked as a pump jockey for a summer job when I was 15. It wasn’t exactly a stimulating job so I was excited when this cute girl and her mother pulled up to the full-service pump (yes, I know this is starting like a “Penthouse Letters” piece but I assure you, it’s not). I put the gas in the car and shared some awkward glances and smiles with the daughter as I was cleaning the windshield. (The teenaged girl obviously knew I was an industrious young man paying my dues at a summer job). I stole one last eye-lock with the girl as her mom paid me. As they started to pull away I noticed that the hose that I had left in the car due to my flirting was quickly stretched to its limit. “STOP!” I screamed as I reached for the hose that suddenly snapped sending Exxon 87 unleaded into my eyes, clothes, and anything else in vicinity. Lucky for me the mom who was driving was an optometrist’s assistant and she was much more worried about helping me rinse my eyes in the grimy men’s room than the fuel that doused the side of her car. But instead of sending me home, the owner’s son who was managing that day, gave me some fresh coveralls to complete my shift after he taped off the out of order the pump. Later that SAME afternoon I heard a man yelling from the self-serve pumps to see that ANOTHER hose had broken and he was holding the hose at face level like he was trying to choke out a snake while it was spraying gasoline everywhere. I ran toward the pumps to hit the emergency shut-off while shouting at him to point the hose at the ground. Right before I got to him I slipped in some oil that had become extra slick from the gasoline spray and slipped with my legs in the air like I was in a 1930's slapstick comedy. It was THEN that guy pointed the hose downward and sprayed me with fuel like I was a contestant in wet T-shirt contest. Again, back to the men’s room to rinse my eyes for another 15 minutes. At that point the owner’s son said, “Maybe you should just go home for the day”.