During the summer of my senior year in college, having wrapped up job hunting, I started working part-time at a local gas station.

My reason for applying was simple: it was close to home and the pay was decent.

But there was another reason, too.

It was a self-service station, which made the job ridiculously easy.

Before getting into the main story, let me explain what my job entailed—though calling it "work" is a stretch; it was more like a single chore.

Whenever an alert popped up on the monitor by the counter indicating a customer was ready to pump, I just tapped the screen. Tapping it authorized the pump so they could start fueling. Embarrassingly enough, that was the entire job. It was crazy how braindead easy it was.

About two months in, I was sitting in my usual chair behind the counter, staring at the monitor. I was on the night shift that day, working with a full-time employee.

It was 9:00 p.m. With an hour left until closing, the full-timer headed into the back office to start inputting the day's sales data.

Left alone, I read manga and glanced up at the monitor every now and then, waiting for my shift to end.

Just as I finished the manga and was about to pull out my phone, an alert came in from one of the pump lanes.

The monitor showed that a pump nozzle—the thing you stick into a car's gas tank—had just been lifted. This alert only meant the nozzle holster was open before any payment had been inserted. Usually, it just meant a customer had mistakenly pulled the nozzle out before paying, so leaving it alone wasn't an issue.

What felt off, though, was that the same alert started chiming sporadically from several other lanes.

Was a kid messing around?

Looking out across the station from the entrance, I spotted a woman lifting nozzles and setting them back down, over and over.

She must have lost or dropped something, I thought.

I checked to make sure there were no pending authorizations on the monitor, called out to the full-timer in the back office, and headed out toward the pumps.

By the time I got outside, though, the woman was nowhere to be seen. The only vehicles parked at the pumps were a van and a subcompact car.

Wondering if she had found what she was looking for, I headed back to the counter, when the intercom buzzed. It was from the pump on the far end—the customer in the van.

I picked it up right away.

The second I answered, a middle-aged man's furious voice blasted through the speaker.

"Hey! You messing with me?! What the hell is going on out here?!"

The sudden yelling caught me completely off guard, leaving me speechless.

"Get out here! Right now, dammit!"

Flustered, I hurried over to where the van was parked.

A burly man in work clothes, somewhere in his forties or fifties, was already shouting at me again as I approached.

Oh crap... he's gonna hit me.

Terrified and still having no clue what was going on, I bowed and stammered apologies as I stepped up to him.

The moment I reached him, he clamped a hand tightly around my arm.

Pathetically, I let out a squeak.

"Hey," he growled, pulling his face close to my ear.

"Stay right here and don't move," he whispered. My head was spinning with confusion, but his next words sent a violent chill down my spine.

"I'm calling the cops. When you came outside, a huge woman carrying hedge shears slipped into the station's restroom."

In less than ten minutes, the police arrived. A woman as tall as a volleyball player, with wild, unkempt hair, came walking out of the restroom holding hedge shears and laughing hysterically. They tackled and pinned her instantly.

I had no idea this job would be that kind of crazy.