Pomphouders dupe van ‘spookliters’

For those that can read Dutch. This is a nice example of Dutch gasstation owners wanting to be compensated for the fact that gasoline (or any other fluid you can sell) schrinks when cooled.

What happens is, that the delivery trucks cary the gasoline at the normal outside temperatures. When pumped into the underground tanks at the station, the number of liters is measured and the gasstation owner gets charged for those liters. Then, the gasoline cools down (and shrinks!) because it is stored underground. So when de car owners put the gas in their car, the cold (“smaller”) liters get measured and the gasstation owner is “swindled by nature” because het can only sell say 99 liters of gasoline, while he bought 100 from the oil company!

Now, things get better because the gassstation owner wants to be compensated for this law of nature! It’s like wanting to be compensated for the fact that you get wet when you jump in the water.

Now, let’s say this is *really* a problem, because in my opinion it isn’t, they make enough money and they could have known this upfront if they have had payed attention in first grade. You can basically do two things about this:

1. Insulate the underground tank, and maybe even heat it. You can actually now “swindle” the car owners, because you can sell them “more” petrol than you have bought from the oil company! Woopee!. You might want to check your heating bill at the end of the year though, I doubt it will do you any good.
2. We can start selling petrol/gasoline by *kilograms*, which is actually allready standard in some forms of industry. It’s a bit harder to measure, but absolutely independant of the temperature of the product

Just another fine example of people allways wanting to change the rules and be compensated for anything they “missed out” on. And we find it strange that the world becomes more burocratic. tsss.