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The Insolent Gas Pump
In the first episode of Get Smart (in glorious black-and-white) Agent Maxwell Smart’s shoe begins ringing like a solid old Bell telephone while he is at a concert (as in music, not existential yowling). The shoe-phone gag, complete with a large rotary dial, was sustained over the life of the series, along with many other logical and illogical gadgets.
Gadgets are fun – telephones, typewriters, Italian Army knives, illuminated magnifiers, barometers, cuckoo clocks, can openers, self-changing record players, the sort of technology that knows its place and doesn’t give itself airs.
But civilization comes to a skidding Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote stop with talking gas pumps that show movies.
Once upon a time when you wanted gas for your car you stopped at the filling station and a nice man wearing a Texaco shirt and a bowtie (miss you, George) filled your car’s tank and checked under the hood, whatever checking under the hood meant. In illo tempore a gallon of gas cost about the same as a cup of coffee, and, come to think of it, still does.
But now you have to get out of the car, produce a plastic card, and negotiate with the pump according to questions and instructions legible on the screen only when the sun is at exactly the right angle, usually around dawn on the the summer solstice.
And then the gas pump puts on a moving picture show. First, there’s the weather. Snow? I don’t think so. But the next day there was snow.
The other day there was a trivia quiz, followed some gossip about Miley Kardashian or somebody like that who’s going to marry the king of Crete, I think.
There was no Roadrunner cartoon or a John Wayne, so what’s the point of a talking gas pump with movies?
But here’s where things get awkward – you find yourself talking back to the gas pump.
This is one of those, like, you know, existential moments, and, like, when you pause midway through the journey of life and find yourself in a gloomy forest of gas pumps (it’s in Dante if you want to look it up).
When you find yourself arguing with a gas pump, you’ve reached an existential whatchamacallit.
Look, on my home planet you just don’t converse with gas pumps. Toasters, maybe. Thermostats, rarely, and only on general topics, like the weather.
But never gas pumps.
Gas pumps, because they light up and show you talking pictures, are like the tenant’s wife in Barchester Towers who now has a piano in the parlour and so feels free to address an archdeacon at the squire’s garden party as if they were social equals.
We just can’t have that.
The next time the gas pump talks to me I’m going to keep my responses polite but just this side of curt.
You know Curt; we all went to school together.
Talking gas pumps. Harrumph. What next – will the coffee maker begin exchanging gossip with the microwave?
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