Oregon now lets people pump their own gas and some Oregonians are losing their minds over it

[MineralMan]

186. Back in the old days, when I was a gas pump jockey,

there was a mechanical credit card imprinter at every lane of pumps. There was no electronic processing. You stuck the card in the imprinter, put a multi-copy receipt on top of it, set the amount on mechanical numbering sliders and ran a roller over the whole shebang. Then, you had the customer sign the receipt, tore off the top copy and handed it to the customer. The other copies went a slot on a locked box where the imprinter was mounted.

That's how that worked. Later, someone wrote all of those amounts on a deposit slip, bundled up the copies of the signed receipts and took the whole batch to the bank for deposit.

There was life before computers. I lived it.

People didn't wait long at the stations I worked at. A car pulled in and you trotted over to the car. "Fill 'er up?" "Can I check your oil?" A good worker could handle two or three cars simultaneously, check their oil, eyeball the tires, and wash the windows. When the pump clicked off, you ran over and handle the payment.

In between cars, you did oil changes, mounted tires, and sometimes washed cars.