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Comment by mauvehaus | Hacker News Reader

Have you filled a car with gas any time in the last ~5 years? The pumps around here (New England, USA) start playing ads with sound once you start pumping fuel. It's an absolute delight when your pump and the pump on the other side of your island are playing different ads with different audio or the same ad with the audio just out of sync.

Usually, one of the soft buttons on the left or right edge of the screen is a secret mute button. Occasionally, none of them are, and rarely does anyone else seem to even try to mute their pump.

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Someone has put caulking in many of speakers at my usual gas station. Not all heros wear capes.

Pumping gas became pretty infrequent for me once I got a plug in hybrid, but when the closest gas station near me first started playing an ad my immediate reaction was to spam all of the side buttons on the screen until I found the one that muted it. Sweet quiet...

I rarely see these any more (USA, not a small town). Could be the set of gas stations I visit doesn’t have them, but I do remember them being popular for a while. Now I haven’t seen one in a very long time.

This is one of the top things pushing me to an EV, so I can charge at home and be done with gas stations. As EVs get more market share, these intrusive ads will only get worse.

I wonder what happens if you take a sharp object such a screwdriver and poke all the speakers…

While being recorded from 6 different angles while standing next to your vehicle with a license plate on it?

You get arrested. That’s what happens.

Kiosk makers have already thought of all of these possibilities. There isn’t a nicely exposed speaker. It’s behind a metal plate with tiny holes in it.

> You get arrested. That’s what happens.

For petty vandalism? That seems like an expensive overreaction.

Perhaps it depends on your demography.

People get arrested for petty vandalism all the time, even if they didn't petty vandalize.

The police won't bother to track down who graffitied your fence, but money-making companies are a different matter.

And it definitely depends on demography. I assume they're still using it, but maybe they just plug everyone's face into Palantir now.

Maybe cops are different where you live, but here in Seattle, I cannot imagine a crime so trivial as "someone broke the speaker on a gas pump" ever rising high enough on the SPD priority list for anyone to lift a finger about it, no matter how well-documented it may have been.

It would not surprise me to hear that someone had committed a crime of that scale while being watched by an SPD officer and still gotten away with it.

There's no need to. If the unit is older than a few months, you'll find that the speakers have already been perforated.

This usually doesn't stop them from working, because people don't break the voice coil at the center.

You probably get a visit from the police.

At one point I was so infuriated that I would feel for the speaker and punch the pump so hard it would knock the speaker out of place (many pumps flimsy plastic.) I did that as many times as I could until the service company started gluing them in better. So I upped and ante by ripping open the front of the pump and tear the speaker out with my bear hands and smash it. Did that a bunch of times until the volumes were turned down.

> Usually, one of the soft buttons on the left or right edge of the screen is a secret mute button

I found out that's the help button and sometimes a clerk will come out and ask what I need help with and I tell that it stops the annoying noise coming from the pump.

That's pretty unhinged, but I'm glad there's someone out there vandalizing annoying pumps. It's important work, I think.

I’m reminded of the film Falling Down but I’ve given you an Internet point (upvote) for fighting the good fight. If good people do nothing, evil will triumph. In Ireland, we don’t (yet?) have such devilish instruments of torture but I imagine my cortisol levels would be through the roof if I had to deal with them.

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