Time to get more fuel/oil/water/food/whatever.

I was traveling with a partner a while ago and commented that we needed to get gas.

He asked me how much we had left and I replied that we didn't have very much. He didn't argue, he simply went to his phone and found us a station. We gassed up and were back on the road in a few minutes.

Then there's the other kind of person.

"We need gas."

"How much do you have left?"

"Not much."

"How much is not much?
"Under 1/8th of a tank."

"How much is that?"

By this time I'm pretty aggravated. I want to end this kind of stupidity here and now. I an very likely to answer that "We have 1.2387485729474957345734035053 gallons left. Close enough for you?" It will likely not be in a kind voice, either.

The term 'not much' in certain circumstances is a bona fide unit of measurement. 

It's the same with everything else, too, depending on who you are dealing with.

It really doesn't matter exactly how much of a commodity you have when you are running out of it because if you don't get some soon you WILL be out. Yet there is always some chairborne ranger type bean counter that wants some kind of exact figure for some dumb reason.

Often in certain instances I will say I need somewhat less than the tank/storage room/locker/whatever can hold simply because I want to be able to take all I am sent. In other circumstances it really does not matter.

In fuel and lube tanks you want to leave room for expansion anyway and 10% is a reasonable figure. Of course the tanks on board a tanker vessel are a lot bigger than the tank on the family Honda Accord.

Several years ago while I was doing oil spill cleanup work in the Gulf of Mexico we had to have fuel, water and grub delivered. None of these were a real problem. You would just stuff the water tank until it overflowed. We'd fill the fuel tank and when it got near the 90% mark we would have the supplying vessel slow down the pump and shut down when it hit the 90% mark. After the hose was disconnected we would compare before soundings with after soundings and calculate the difference to figure out how much fuel we took.

Seldom would the figures between us and the supplier be the same. We'd add them both up, divide it by two and call it good because that was the best we could come up with. 

Grub was basically what we could eat for the rest of the tour plus some left over for the other crew so they would have something to come back to. We'd be fairly careful on how much we ordered that needed refrigeration. I remember once we had to shovel down a half-gallon of ice cream but we always seemed to find room for the stuff that needed refrigeration,

Non perishables we seldom gave a second thought as we could simply leave the stuff we didn't immediately need in a box until we found room in the grub locker.

Yet there was always someone in the chain that wanted exact figures. They were given estimates and told that it was as close as we could figure it. After a while they realized that we were unable to come up with an exact figure.

Still, in my daily life I sometimes run into someone that doesn't get it. 

The next time I say that I need gas and someone asks how much we have left I am simply going to say, "Hopefully enough to get us to the next gas station."







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