Robert's Blog

There once was a man of low ambition who worked at a gas station off of a long lonely stretch of highway. He worked at that gas station every day for most of his life, just as his father did. He never wanted to do anything else because this was all he ever knew. Every day he just did his job, filling the gas tanks of the few cars that came his way. Day after day after day. He never wondered what lay beyond the horizon.

One day a package arrived. The man opened the package to find some stickers. The stickers were warnings about the dangers of filling your gas while talking on the cell phone. The man didn't understand this because he couldn't read very well but he knew what to do. The man took those stickers and stuck them on the gas pumps being careful to keep them straight. The man did feel pride occasionally and felt a brief moment of pride after placing those shiny new stickers on the gas pumps. But, unknown to this gas station man, there was a small bubble in one of these stickers. A small bit of air trapped between the sticker and the shiny metal of the gas pump.

Time went by and the sticker faded in the hot sun, but the bubble remained. More time passed... The gas station man grew old and died and the gas station closed down, but the pumps remained and the bubble survived. By now, the stickers could no longer be read. More time... The material that made up the stickers was now degrading and becoming weak. And more time passed... Then, one day, the material of the sticker became so weak that the part that held the bubble, trapping the air for so long, finally broke open and the air escaped never to be trapped together again in this manner. And no one ever knew or would have even cared.