3 years with an electric car
-It would help if you first plugged in the cable and then complete the payment. Then you run three laps backward around the car, do seven equal-footed jumps at the charger to ward off evil charging spirits and pray to higher powers that it will work. Ideally, you should sacrifice part of a fossil car on the charging altar. And of course, you have to hold and lift the charging handle while the charger and the vehicle agree that they want to work together; that's not up to you but up to the parties involved.
-I don't believe in this electric car thing, do you? My charging neighbor asked me in Örebro. I was on my way home from the ski games in Falun with destination Lomma in Skåne, one of many long trips with our EV. I replied that I do and that it has worked quite well during the three years and 75,000 kilometers I have driven with my car so far. And it will be another pure electric car by the summer when it's time to change.
I left the man and went into Circle K. A newly renovated station with large areas, a gate with card payment for toilet visits, SEK 10. After several attempts to pay with no meaningful error messages, no message at all, I figured out that the machine didn't like certain cards and tried another one. Whoops, after a short eternity, almost making an accident on the floor, I was inside. A massage chair, a health check machine, and a cleaning robot that were chasing customers between the candy shelves. The recent renovation and new ways gave a feeling that this is Scandinavia's freshest Circle K toilet. But it turned out that it was just the opposite. I opened four stalls before finding one that was helpfully OK. Stop and paper mixed grief in the first. Someone who left underwear in the second and a customer who had terrible luck with the sight in the third.
Even the hand washing station was high-tech and told you to wash your hands for at least 20 seconds and kindly helped me with the countdown. However, the trash was too full, spilling over the nice installation and onto the floor. I wonder if this whole idea is that the Circle K staff should focus on selling hot dogs instead of cleaning the toilets, a win-win. If customers have to pay to fulfill their needs, they don't behave like pigs. They were somewhat unlucky in their thinking.
Without having my hamstring cut by the cleaning robot, I paid my stuff at one of the two automatic cash registers that the staff didn't trust and the customers didn't understand. This means that instead of selling and talking about the weather, you have staff who now run 1-1 payment training with annoyed customers who think that technology is overrated and that everything was better in the old days.
All this took some time before I headed out to my car, which had charged what I needed for the following stint, Jönköping. On the other hand, my charging neighbor had just started charging and was going to wedge himself into the Circle K toilet with a not-so-happy face. Welcome and good luck with your electric car ownership!
