One of my biggest fears — an employment lawyer neuroticism — is that I will draft a settlement agreement in which I misplace the decimal point or accidentally add a zero, thus turning a $15,000.00 settlement into a $15,000,000 settlement.
That’s why I spell out the number (fifteen thousand) and use Microsoft Word’s “Read Aloud” feature to proof my draft agreements. (Sorry millennials, I don’t think Google Docs has that one yet.)
The same holds true at the gas pump. Not the whole Microsoft Word thing. Instead, with gas prices skyrocketing — over $6/gallon in some areas — imagine what would happen if a gas station manager put the decimal point before the first digit in the gas price instead of the after. Like instead of listing the premium gas price as $6.99 per gallon, it’s posted as $0.699 per gallon.
Apparently, that happened recently at a gas station in California.
CBS News reports that “drivers soon lined up after friends and family members posted photos on social media and alerted them to the low cost of gas at the Rancho Cordova station — an unheard of price given that the average per gallon cost of regular gasoline is now $5.01 and premium gasoline costs an average of $5.69.”
Me? If that hit my TikTok, I’d assemble all my blog minions post-haste to gas up the Bugatti (that’s plural, commoners).
Unfortunately for the gas station manager, the mistake proved costly. The local CBS Sacramento affiliate reports that it cost the gas station $16,000, and the manager lost his job.
Since it was an accident, the former manager has no legal duty to pay the money back. However, his family had started a GoFundMe account for him to raise $20,000 to reimburse the gas station. And they’ve almost met their goal.
Shout out to the family; if I operated a gas station, I’d hire that guy in a heartbeat.
While this wasn’t quite the $15,000.00 to $15,000,000 error over which I sometimes fret, this honest mistake does give me agita. And since sometimes I’m a glutton for punishment — you should see the gas bills for my private planes — I’d love for you to email me your misplaced decimal point stories. Maybe, I’ll post a few next week.