As a mother of three whose children have a combined age of 46, I’ve generally mastered the art of multitasking, though it can backfire. And when it does, it does with a bang, sometimes literally. I am going to share a cautionary tale here. Though it ended well, it was not pretty. I am telling it in the hopes of saving someone else the trouble I’ve seen.
It started out as a spectacular, sunny Friday afternoon. Molly was home for spring long weekend, and we had packed up the minivan for a college road trip. We would wend our way north and hit the towns and universities that made them famous.
We got a bit of a later start than planned, and so it was that we found ourselves on the Connecticut Turnpike at 3:30 in the afternoon. Anyone who has hit I-95 at any time knows it’s a parking lot all the time, but at that hour on a Friday, it’s a nightmare. We decided to fortify ourselves at the first Connecticut rest stop, which beckoned like all the others with a Mobil station and a McDonald’s. Though my tank was still a quarter full, I figured what the heck, I’ll top it off for the miles looming ahead.
It was precisely at the very moment that I was pulling in front of the pumps that I received a call on my cell. It was Will, off the bus and waiting to be picked up by a friend’s mom, but he needed to talk to me urgently right then and there. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a sign telling me to pull to the forward pump, so good citizen that I am, I did. As I was talking and pumping, I noticed the sign saying I’d be paying $3.19 a gallon. “Hold on now!” shouted my frugal inner voice. “When you pulled in, it was $3.17; what’s with the two cents extra?” It was only then that I observed that my pump had a yellow handle; the three behind me all had blue ones. I stopped the call and stopped the pump. I was pumping diesel! I had already pumped in 8 gallons! I didn’t understand the exact ramifications of my error, but in my gut, I knew it couldn’t be good.
My contrary inner voice said, “Just finish pumping with regular, dilute the diesel, and get along on your merry way.” But my sensible voice told me, “Don’t do it!” I went to the guy in the window. Unfortunately, his English was not very good, so he couldn’t offer any great advice, but he did make a gesture with his hands, wide, as if indicating a very large bread box, and declared, “Big problem!” “But what should I do?” I implored, the damsel in distress inside me kicking to be released. “Call police!” he said, handing me a slip of paper with a phone number.
“Hello, I’m at the gas station on I-95 and I’ve got a big problem,” I told Mr. Sergeant. “I’d rather stay put here than drive out on the highway and become your big problem.” Mr. Sergeant was not amused, not nice, and not helpful. “Call your car service, lady,” he said.
Long story short: I called AAA. I love AAA. It’s probably one of the best deals in America. They sent out a truck and loaded up my poor, loyal minivan. We got into the cab, Molly sitting on my lap since it was only a two-seater. We had intended to spend quality mother-daughter time, and now we were.
For those of you who don’t know: diesel is thicker than regular gas; as one of the guys told me, it has a consistency almost like olive oil, so it can really muck up your tank, fuel lines, filters, and transmission. I ended up renting a car for the rest of the weekend and leaving my sad little van in Stamford so they could drain the diesel and clean everything out.
The bottom line : $266 to fix my car; $73 to fill it up with premium gas (to coddle it); $160 for a rental; $200 for an extra night in a hotel. You can do the math. It’s too painful for me. But the lessons learned about turning adversity into adventure? Teaching your child to laugh over this kind of mishap because the only alternative is to cry? The fun that followed on the rest of the trip? Priceless.
The story was too hard to tell over the phone, so I waited until we were safely back home to tell all to my poor husband, who has already suffered so much when it comes to me and our family cars. “Of course you almost killed the car because we just finished paying it off,” he joked. “But if I had done the same thing, you would have accused me of doing it on purpose.” (Though I love my minivan, for some inexplicable reason, my husband and kids do not).
I felt better when I later found out I was not alone in my mistake. A fellow baseball mom told me she and her husband had done the very same thing, probably at the very same rest stop. But since it was dark, they did not realize they had filled their tank with diesel until they had gone many miles down the road and the transmission blew up. The price of their folly? $1,500! In a way, I guess I should consider myself lucky.
