Here we go again...

Decided to settle our credit card bills today, thinking we’d beat the rush of people when payday comes. But, we ran into another kind of rush today. The rush for petrol…again! In case you haven’t heard, word is that all petrol stations will go on strike for 3 days starting tomorrow. The reason? From what I gathered, it is because the government refuses to allow the owners of petrol kiosks to push the 4% credit charges to customers. Too bad I didn’t bring along my camera to get some pic of the whole affair.

So, there we were as a family, thinking what a breeze it’d be doing our errands when we saw a long, a very long queue right as we coming out of the access road from our taman. It was 5 pm then, and it was too late for Tshung Tsin to have finished school, and too early afternoon session schools to have finished. So we took the Tuaran road to head to KK. And we saw another queue! This time from Kian Kok right up till Sunny Garden! Luckily that was in the opposite direction towards Tuaran.

So that got us wondering….what’s the cause? My wife’s car is the family car, and she was almost running on empty. The light was blinking incessantly, a reminder that we needed to pump petrol soon, very soon. There was an Esso station at Sunny Garden, but it was closed for some kind of renovation or repairs. So, we decided to just head on to KK as there was also an Esso station near where we were heading, the one near Maybank. Along the way, we saw Jalan Kolam also backlogged with cars…

It was pretty smooth sailing apart from the usual traffic snarl at that time. But upon hitting Jalan Pantai, there was another jam. And it was long! So we took the back way of the shophouses right up till Maybank, and then we stopped dead in our tracks. It was a gridlock. No one was moving. The cause: the queue at the Esso station, our destination. My face fell. The light never stopped blinking. Fen ran out to find out what was going on and that’s how we knew about the supposed strike.

Rather than keep the engine running and run the risk of running out of petrol, we somehow managed to manoeuvre and go the other way to find a parking. We found one soon enough, parked and walked to the three banks to pay our bills. Stopped by Tong Hing and Home and Garden as well. And when we walked back to the car to put some things in, we saw a car we had seen earlier in the queue in the exact position before. It hadn’t moved! And easily 30 minutes had passed by then.

So, rather than being stuck in the jam, we decided to walk around for a bit. Went for dinner, walked around Wisma Merdeka and then walked back to the car. Jam was still there for that Esso station. But driving home wasn’t a problem. Jalan Kolam was already clear, and so we figured we’d just go ahead and pump. We waited in line for about 15 minutes, pumped to the max and drove home. At that time, two pumps were already out of petrol.

While filling up the car, I asked the attendant whether the news was true. He confirmed my suspicions. There were only rumours. His boss told him that they’d be open for tomorrow; there were no plans for a strike.

I don’t understand why people would spread hearsay without first confirming it with a reliable source. I suspect the cause for today’s mess was spread through sms. And this will not be the first time such a thing has happened, nor will it be the last, I think. SMS is a good thing, but responsible use of it is better.

Oh well…

And did you know that a full tank for a Proton Iswara 1.3 now costs RM112? Yikes! That’s RM50 more than previously. Ouch!

Read here and here for other bloggers' view on the event.

p.s. Is it just me, or am I facing a jam of some kind as well with blogspot. My pages seem to load very slowly…