(Day 79) These days I get rid of my drain oil

 at a service station that has a drain oil burning stove. It helps heat the place in winter and he'll take all I have for free.

It wasn't always that way.

A while back I listened to some whiny little hippie chick bitch about the local as station refusing to take her pair of milk jugs full of drain oil for free.

Seems the station owner wanted a whole dollar of offset his costs. Gee! A whole dollar!

It would be one thing if the dollar was as valuable as the one George Washington threw across the Potomac river. This was a recent dollar that the president couldn't even get to go a twentieth of the way across the river because a dollar doesn't go as far as it used to.

I made a mental note that I had about five gallons of the slop to get rid of. Later that day I threw the 5 gallon oil can in the back of my pickup and headed to the reviled service station. The owner was there.

"How much you paying these days to get rid of old drain oil? I asked him.

"Twenty-five cents a gallon," he replied.

"Sounds about right," I said. I held out three bucks.

"I'm a capitalist and I have five gallons to get rid of," I said. "Here's the way I figure it. There's a buck and a quarter for the cost of having the guy come in and pull out my 5 gallons. The tank cost you something so here's a buck toward paying for the tank, leaving you 75 cents to put in your pocket. Sound fair?"

He laughed. "How can I say no?"

Then he turned to me. "You are one of the very, very few that understand how this business works," he said. "Incidentally I did have to replace my tank last year and it was pretty expensive. You may not know it, but you are the first one that has offered to pay."

I have used that station for a few odds and ends through the years and simply because of that little offer to pay for getting rid of drain oil the guy has taken pretty good care of me.  

Sometimes when you cast your bread on the water you get back poached eggs on toast.

As for the hippie chick?

Who cares. If she's afraid to cast her bread on the water she can just stand there with a handful of stale, moldy bread and a gaggle of gallon milk bottles of drain oil for all I care. It was her choice.



To find out why the blog is pink just cut and paste this: http://piccoloshash.blogspot.com/2009/12/my-feminine-side-blog-stays-pink.html NO ANIMALS WERE HARMED IN THE WRITING OF TODAY'S ESSAY