It's Monday, early afternoon. Just finished up an appointment right around the corner from the Chevron station right by the corner of Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue and Malcolm X Avenue SE, and need gas badly.

So I pull into the Chevron and insert a credit card into one of the pumps. It doesn't work—have to go inside and pay. I tell the clerk, hey, please put me down for $30.

Back to the pump. It barely works. Every time I squeeze the nozzle, it stops, as if I had a full-to-the-brim tank of gas, instead of a totally empty one. I switch the position of the nozzle in every possible way, but the glitch keeps recurring. If I find a real sweet spot, I get the thing pumping for, like, 15 seconds, max.

This goes on for about five minutes, by which time I've gotten just more than $20 worth of gas. That's enough, I decide, and head into the station to get my refund. I say I'd like a receipt for the refunded amount. He says no receipt available—trust me, he says, it'll show up on your bank statement.

I tell him I'd like a receipt, please. He punches some numbers off the cash register and hands me a receipt. I tell him that's the wrong instrument to issue the receipt—I need a receipt from the same machine that my credit card had been run through—the machine that's tapped into my credit card company.

He says don't worry about it. Meantime, other people are waiting and hovering and so on, so I bag out of there.

Days later, there's no sign of my refund. So I now have a case number with Chevron's customer service people. I want my $9.69 back.