I have been in the above station frequently. While the employees do not know me by name, my face is surely familiar. On Friday, March 14th at approximately 6:10 I stopped to fill my car up with gas. Unfortunately and unbeknownst to me when I tried to pay by debit card I had insufficient funds. When I tried to work the situation out with the persons who were working in the station, they rejected all of my attempts and said they would call the police if I did not pay and left the premises. As I have frequently stopped at this station I was shocked by the treatment that I was given. I could have given them all of the information from my driver's license and I had called my wife so that she could give her credit card number. In stead, my wife had to drive 40 miles to swipe her credit card.

While I must take responsibility for not having sufficient funds in my account, I still feel that the treatment that I was given was hostile and inappropriate. I have been a member of the business community for 20 some odd years. Surely I am not the first person who has had this or a similar experience. While what the employees did was legal I feel that it was totally inappropriate in terms of how another human being should have been treated. Subsequently, my wife had stopped at some gas stations to ask how they would have treated the same situation. Uniformly, she was told that they would take down the information on the person's driver's license and give them 24-48 hours to pay the bill. It is disturbing, humiliating, and enraging how this situation was handled.