Please don’t be alarmed or offended, my friend. A group of your loved ones has contacted me and they are concerned. They are concerned about your character, or lack thereof. You are a good person, they tell me, but within you is a paucity of the kind of steel that makes a person whole.

This is an intervention. You need help, stranger, and I am here to provide it with one easy suggestion.

Pump gas.

You heard me, son. Get yourself a dingy blue jumpsuit, learn how to handle a dipstick, and spend some time attending to the fuel needs of impatient strangers.

For two years, I pumped gas at a station with a deformed bird as its emblem. For two years, I was mistreated and ridiculed, maligned and forced to work as a gas-reeking slave for man and his hungry machines.

Few workers are as shabbily treated as the men and women whose tools are the gas nozzle, the oil funnel and the tire gauge. Do you wonder why almost none exist anymore? So horrible is the way they were handled by their fellow man, many gas jockeys chose to run away and be a part of something more humane: inmate at a Turkish prison or janitor at a leper colony.

I remember lumbering out of that spacious 3- by 4-foot booth in subzero winter weather. The car sitting before the pumps is trying to shine beneath gray crusts of road salt. Behind the wheel, a fat man has the radio cranked and he’s chomping on a cigar. When I get to the window, shivering and turning blue, he lowers it one-half inch.

“Fi’ dollars unleaded. Check the oil and the antifreeze. Front right tire needs air.”

The irony always slays me. People who order five dollars in gasoline and pad it with demands for a dozen other services cannot pronounce the word “five.” It is always “fi'” because they don’t have time to articulate that additional “v” and cumbersome “e” to the likes of some lowly gas waitress.

So I pump the gas. I open the hood and try to get my frozen fingers around that skinny rod so I can check the oil. The oil is fine; it always is. A screaming elephant of winter wind tries to snatch the eyeballs right out of my head but I persevere. I drag the hose out and squeeze 0.05 pounds of air into a tire that was not even slightly deficient.

I go back to the driver, eyes filled with wind-inflicted tears that are turning to ice. I say in my best manservant voice: “That will be five dollars, please.”

The fat man with his reeking cigar does not look at me. He merely squeezes a bill through the crevice he is forced to keep between window and frame to accommodate my silly requests.

The bill is a fifty. So I go back inside, use the ice blocks serving as fingers to punch keys on the register and get the fat man’s change. My purple, frozen thumb falls off and clanks into the nickel drawer, but I ignore it. I go back outside, smile as I fork over the change, and the man says: “You didn’t wash the windshield.”

No fantasy is as richly detailed as those that occur in the mind of a gas whore. I used to envision myself dragging the fat man out of his car, stuffing the cigar up his nose and then beating him with a thousand air fresheners shaped like little pine trees. I used to stand on the gas-soaked tarmac, staring blankly into nothing as I envisioned the sublime joy of stringing him up with an air hose and letting neighborhood children use him as a piata.

“BUY FI’ DOLLARS IN GAS; GET A FREE WHACK AT A FAT, ARROGANT MORON!” the sign in front of the station would say.

But, no. I smile and nod as I grab the squeegee and go to work on the fat man’s windshield, which is as pristine as a window in heaven. Beyond it, the fat man grins savagely and I know what resides in that cruel, misshapen head:

“I may be nothing in this world, little man. I work for people who are smarter than me and nobody listens to what I say. But today, in front of these pumps, you work for me! While I am here, I am somebody and you are nothing!”

And then the next car rolls in. It is long and sleek and a rich older woman is behind the wheel. She is sliding lipstick over cracked, bitter lips while uttering her demands for gasoline and associated products. She never looks at me, doesn’t thank me, doesn’t acknowledge my existence at all, except to complain that I spilled a drop of gasoline onto her bumper.

I smile and nod even though the muscles of my face have frozen into the consistency of venison. I pull a rag from my back pocket and commence to wiping off that speck of gleaming gasoline from the scarred bumper. I know the woman in the car is an aging socialite who never got the Mercedes or the pool boy she feels she deserves, but by God, she has me today and I’d better do her bidding.

Character, my friend. Pump some gasoline and you will have all you need and more. You will have the inner strength to smile at the pompous people you encounter in the world as they compensate for their shortcomings by mistreating you.

You will find the ability to empathize with the people who perform menial jobs for the fat cats of the world and you will admire that they get through their days without running amok with meat cleavers.

If you work at an insufferable job you feel is even more degrading than the lofty art of fuel distribution, feel free to write me. Tell me all about it, you poor, poor thing.

Just be quick about it, peon, and don’t waste my time.

Mark LaFlamme is the Sun Journal crime reporter. You can e-mail your diatribe to him at [email protected].