Humorous
Excerpt from CHAPTER 01
I've been pumping gas for three years. I'm good at it, which is sad. No one should ever work at a gas station long enough to get good at it. You should work there for only a few months in high school, then move the fuck on. I didn't. I started when I was seventeen at a Shell station on Dakota, across from St. Vital Mall. Our proximity to the mall and to the Perimeter Highway, and the fact that we were the only place for miles that sold diesel, ensured that we were busy as fuck all the fucking time. I quickly learned that being fast was an asset. I worked there until, when I was eighteen, I was arrested for drinking and driving and I lost my licence. I was forced to find a job closer to home in Oakbank that I could walk to, and since my only experience was pumping gas, the only job I could find was at a gas station/hardware store on Oakbank's main drag. My bosses there were a middle-aged couple. They were both schizophrenic. Not clinically, but they acted like it. One day they'd be your best friend, and the next they'd be bitching you out for something stupid for no reason at all. You can only take so much of that kind of instability, so eventually I applied at the CountryGas gas station across the street and got hired on there. Quitting the hardware store was one of the most satisfying things I've ever done.
Fast forward one year and I'm twenty years old and still at the CountryGas station, and my total work experience is still just pumping liquefied dinosaur bones into the tanks of people's shitty cars. It's not my fault I'm in this rut. Staying at this gas station is just too easy. The customers suck, sure, but my boss, Jane, is a sweetheart and for the most part the people I work with are pretty great. So, other than this powerful feeling that my future is getting bleaker and bleaker with every day I unintentionally huff gas fumes, I'm content.
More or less.
