In your gas story, I'm guessing it wasn't even malice, just incompetence. I've learned to be defensive when dealing with HOAs, doctors and other kinds of bureaucracies, because they often make mistakes - which I have to fix, and to which they'll never, ever admit. It's always your fault, or the computer's fault, or someone else's fault - never the organization.
For example, my wife recounts a recent checkup of our doctor in a specialty hospital, in a city 1.5h drive from where we live. In our kids' health card there was a referral document to another specialist in a different facility. The woman processing registration at the hospital just assumed that all papers loose inside the health card must be related to the current visit, and took them without saying anything. Through pure luck, my wife noticed the paper was missing and realized what must have happened - if not for that, we'd have to make another 3 hour round-trip just to get it[0] once we realized it's gone. The receptionist of course denied ever seeing that paper, up until turning around, noticing it on a stack of documents, and saying "ooops!".
Or, the time where our local clinic misplaced half of my wife's medical documentation, and proceeded to claim it never existed in the first place. We had to threaten them with legal action for somebody there to actually look for it, and then they quickly found it in another file (I think in mine).
I have plenty more of such stories - from public and private, big and small bureaucracies alike. Always the same story. The concept of them making a mistake doesn't even compute for them.
I've learned to run my own "post-condition checks" on every bureaucratic interaction. I watch where they put the documents. I ask if the result is in the system. I call to check my request is actually being processed. And for anything done remotely, I try to generate paper trail. Documents go by most expensive tracked postal delivery, with both SMS and paper delivery receipts. Etc.
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[0] - Or maybe, after enough begging and praying, someone would give us a duplicate. Who knows. The transition into era of digital referrals in Poland is messy, and hasn't completed yet. Some facilities still insist on original paper documents.