Gasoline Can: Caveat Emptor – When a can can’t

My gasoline can is old.

After many years of filling and refilling all sorts of stuff have collected at the bottom: crunchy wings of bees; carcasses of adventurous spiders; plain old dirt; dried leaves, etc.

The time arrived to clean it.

How to do that with about one gallon of vintage fuel remaining was the issue.

Options aside, I made the bold move to buy a brand new container, leaving a decision on the old one for later.

[You might say I kicked the can down the road.]

Bringing it home I was feeling smug as I stopped at the local service station for five gallons fill-up.

However, the optimism was unwarranted.

I forgot to read the manual: Paleolithic cave sketches slapped onto the side.

WHAT?

This is simply a gasoline can to fill up the lawnmower and small cultivator engines.

You pick it up on one end with the left hand, carefully lift it; with the right hand direct the spout to the small tank and fill it.

When done put it safely on the ground.

That’s all.

But this is 2014, and everything needs to be:  revised, new, improved, redesigned, green, technologically advanced, so easy that a fool couldn’t screw it up if he was blindfolded, being kicked in the leg by a three year old, having old coke bottles being thrown at him, a bee trying to sting his forehead, and creditors ringing his cell phone incessantly ALL AT THE SAME TIME.

And that is totally in compliance with the EPA, I am sure.

Yet this new and improved technological marvel was a mystery to use; the guy behind me filling two old cans was my most convenient source of help, so I asked him.

He commiserated with my plight, and told me that he had the same initial scratch-his-head reaction: and by the way, it will leak when you use it.

And he was absolutely right!

Mine leaked from the spot where the cap screws into the tank, just as he said.

If that happened when filling up with a hot engine there could easily be a loud and explosive POOF.

Maybe it is only supposed to be used on the Fourth of July?

It is, lamentably in this case, made in the U.S. A.

For the moment I was stumped by regret.

But I stopped and regressed to plain old American practicality.

I had good luck that the old cap and spout fit perfectly on the new can.  Telling this story at the general store where I bought it, one of the owner’s said that people come in all the time asking if they have the old-style spouts.

They don’t.

Sounds like a marketing opportunity for someone.