I always fill up my car when I am down to the last gallon – I know when I am down to the last gallon because I have a computerised “range” reading, along with MPG and various other gizmos on my car. Last night I get the “beep beep” warning and decide to pop around Tescos for a top up. I always fill to the brim too, who wants to go to petrol stations more frequently than they have to?

Anyway, there is a queue of at least 20 cars along the service road leading to Tescos, and yellow-jacketed people are wandering around puffed up with their own self importance. Eventually one walks down the queue and asks through our window – “What are you here for?”. “Petrol” we say, and off he goes. What else did he think we might say?

After about 20 minutes we get to the second car from the front of the queue (my range reading has dropped 6 miles while we’ve crawled about 100 yards). Again, a yellow-jacket knocks on the window. We wind it down. “You can use any pump”, he informs us – heh! I wonder if we’ll always get this service! The woman in front of us seems to have been confused by this simple instruction as there must be about six pumps free, and she is just sitting there. We weave around her stalled indecision and get to a pump. At last!

I leap into life, not wanting to hold up the other desperate motorists for a second longer than necessary, getting the cap off and the nozzle rammed in the inlet pipe and eagerly pulling the handle – whirr, glug, glug as the petrol trickles from the miserly pump as if it is reluctant to let go of its precious content. After three minutes and half a tank of petrol, click – and it stops. I stand there desperately pulling at the handle, nothing – please let me finish filling my car, you can’t have run out already! One of the attendants wanders over. There is a three minute cut-off set. What the hell?

Someone explain why the following logic helps:

• Slow the pumps down. This makes it take longer to fill up a car, so increases the chance of a queue forming.
• Hire some yellow jacketed people to ask pointless questions. This makes it look like there is something serious going on, hence we need to panic and go and fill up before we need to.
• Limit the amount of petrol you can have. This means you have to go back sooner, and queue again increasing the length of the queue.

The woman that was in front of us then pulled up behind us, spent a couple of minutes figuring out how to open her petrol cap, and must have only put one gallon in. Nuts.

The final salt on the wound was that this morning, on the way to work, I passed quite a few petrol stations along the A12, none of which had queues and all seemed to be open. Sigh.