Olivia Starke
In Oregon, a habit just happens to carry on a tradition that the rest of the world left behind a long time ago… the carrying on of the gas pumping job.
“To pump gas into your car you have to pay for it some way either by going inside and prepaying or swipe a card at the pump. Then you take it out and put it in your car, select you fuel type and hold down the lever,” explained Nathan Davis, a senior who works at Quiktrip in Kansas City.
Though people have integrated this into their day-to-day routine, way out in Oregon a unique habit has replaced this for many years, rendering many people enraged at the new law claiming that certain counties must ‘allow’ for people to quote on quote self-pump according to Newsweek.
Keenan Little, a high schooler living in Oregon, claims the reasoning for all the amusement lies in that the tradition challenges their own routine.
“If you’re driving, pumping your own gas is like second nature. So they hear about a place where you can’t do that and now you have people who have never been raised to do that now do that… No one knows how to do anything. So it’s making a lot of pretty good jokes,” he said.
So, as Little said, the humor forms around the bizarre difference from such a habit that here, people do weekly. Also combine this with the fact that other citizens cannot do something that is frequently done by everyone, and soon memes are sure to follow, Little mentions.
“It’s-it’s kind of insane… It kind of makes me wonder how it works like, do you just go up to the person and say hey I need this much gas and just trust that they’re gonna do it correctly?,” said junior Ana Martin of the matter.
“You know, it’s just such a foreign idea. It’s just like I can’t really fully comprehend it. It’s just so weird, like driving on the opposite side of the road,” she concluded
This all leads to the tweets and memes the whole situation has taken to social media, and the responses people have generated as well as reactions to those responses from the people who do pump their own gas. Some people such as Davis have a much more understanding approach while others just laugh about it.
“I can imagine that would be an odd loss to deal with… I can see how back in the day when gas pumping technology was new that it might be necessary to be trained for that sort of thing, but now it just doesn’t make sense,” he said.
However, multiple others have made sense of this ongoing phenomenon through the use of humor.“ -It’s just-it’s just good comedy,” Little sums up, referring to the fact that now many people are expressing via social media that they cannot believe they have to pump their own gas.
Sometimes things seem ridiculous to people because they have never tried participating in those events and other times they seem ridiculous simply because some people can not do the same things that others do every day.
