Gas Tank = Toilet Paper Roll

So apparently there are two types of people:

1) people who fill their gas tank as soon as it gets a bit low;

2) people who drive around on fumes as a matter of course;

and I am one of those people who fills their tank as soon as it gets low-- it's bad for the car to drive with very little gas in the tank: you could burn out the fuel pump and you could kick up sediment (and, of course, you could actually run out of gas and have to freeze your ass off walking to the nearest station) but my wife is one of those people who is always driving around on empty (or even below empty) and while that's normally her business (sort of, because her car is the second most expensive item we own, after our house) sometimes it impinges on my life; Friday, we planned on swapping cars so that she could drop the van at the shop, which is right by her school, so they could put on the snow tires-- and my wife would get a ride to school (the shop is less than a mile from her school) and I would drive her car to my place of work; we made this plan last week, and so on Wednesday, I prepared the van for the swap-- I took out all the soccer equipment and stowed it in the shed-- and then I took the snow tires out from the crawl space (always a difficulty for me because you have to crouch down-- I often hit my head-- but I must point out that I did this chore without my wife's assistance) and I rolled the tires from the backyard to the driveway and put them in the back of the van so we were all prepared for the car swap and Friday morning I got up early, got ready for school, spent some time with my wife in the kitchen discussing the consequences of the FCC's rash and partisan decision on the future of net neutrality, and then hopped in the car-- the correct car, my wife's car-- to execute the final portion of the car swap, the actual swapping, but as I was driving out of town, I noticed that the gas meter was below empty . . . and I was running a little late because of our discussion about net neutrality so I didn't have time to stop for gas-- so I got pretty irate, mainly because my wife has a short commute, so she must have been running low on gas all week, but didn't prepare as considerately for the car swap as I had done and also because it's bad for the engine to run on empty, which I know she does-- she's an incorrigble low gas driver-- and also because I almost got stuck in a massive traffic jam, there was a helicopter hovering over Route 1 and the entire road was shut down and some of the overflow traffic was spilling on to Route 18 (and if I had taken Ryders Lane, I certainly would have run out of gas) and so I called home-- this is the danger of cell-phones, everything happens in real time before you have a chance to cool off, and got Ian to put Catherine on the phone and then I expressed my views on leaving someone a car with no gas in it for a car swap and then when I got to school, I did some research and sent a text describing just what could happen to the engine when you drive on empty and then I conducted an impromptu seven hour poll: I asked all my classes and every teacher I encountered if they ever drove on empty, and I'm happy to say that the results were slightly different than I thought: I began with a rather sexist hypothesis that this was a woman thing, and that women didn't understand the mechanics of an engine, but found that the split was fairly even-- wive's complained about their husbands, women admitted that they were risk-takers, men confided that they were on empty right this very moment, a woman whose father was a mechanic brought up the possibility of burning out the fuel pump, some people said they just hate getting gas and want to do it as little as possible, some people wanted to see just how much it cost to fill the entire tank . . . people were vehemently one side or the other-- people who didn't drive on empty thought that it was insane to do so-- that's my camp and my metaphor is toilet paper, there's very few things in life that you can directly gauge-- your gas tank is one of them and the amount of toilet paper left on the roll is another . . . when the roll gets low, you get more rolls of toilet paper and put them in the bathroom, you don't wait until there's one square left-- that's a disaster waiting to happen and it's a situation that's easy enough to assess and remedy . . .anyway, I don't think there's any way to change people on this issue and I'm not going to try (but I will check my wife's car the night before we do a car swap and if it's on empty, I will just go and get gas, and try not to lecture her about fuel pumps and sediment and frost bite).