It’s like a scene from a George A. Romero movie: a sparse, halogen-lit warehouse of moribund curiosities. Down a corridor lies a decrepit claw machine and abandoned leather massage chair. Arcade machines beg for coinage with buzzing lights and spinning fruit. Outside in the car park was an RAC tow truck doing nothing much and a single executive saloon parked outside the Travelodge. You know inside that Travelodge there is a porn channel being accessed, so you turn inwards, hoping for some sense of civilisation.
They change at night...
Over in the corner a wasted trucker is trying to summon the shutters to rise on the overpriced Wimpy outlet using the power of his mind. Two businessmen with large apostrophes of black under each eye trade stories about the newest model of brick they saw at the NEC trade show, all the while desperately wishing for a Wetherspoons pub to spotaneously power through the stained carpetry in the open plan Costa Coffee where several wastrels employed only for their ability to stay awake throughout the night serve espresso that tastes like busted arse to a variety of thankful-looking elderly couples who started out somewhere near Edinburgh and were aiming for Eastbourne but have yet to make it past Stoke.
Costa coffee. Used to be exciting
Welcome to the average post-midnight service station. There is nothing particularly frightening or unsettling about such a place, except for the hopeless aimlessness that pervades your every sense as you attempt to get the coffee machine working in the own-brand shop that usually has a name like ‘Stop-By’ or ‘Shopz’ or ‘We’ll Screw You On The Bill’. The reason you’ve spent the last ten minutes trying to get the coffee machine working is because the Costa Coffee is so expensive. This is how service stations work – it is their economical model. The industry has long recognised that all of their victims are a captive audience; you can’t simply balk at the price of a Ginsters pasty in one service station and pop next door to the other. The next services is 40 miles away, and yes, it might have toilet paper but it also might not. These are scary thoughts.
So, as an experienced consumer you attempt to salvage a bargain from the outrageous pricing schemes. Even the Dairylea dunker you pick up has implicit in its £4 price tag the suggestion that next time you should go whistle and keep driving in the hopes that you make it to your destination before you starve to death. Unlike the truck driver, who should know better, you are keenly aware of the fact that, if Wimpy was open, it would cost you £7 for a burger and chips and hell, the surroundings are so pile-inducingly dull that you might just fork out for the bloody thing and hope your tears of despair get lost in the overpowering secret sauce.
Secret sauce!
There you are, thinking these thoughts as you stare at the coffee machine. This coffee machine has three stacks of cups of varying sizes, disappearing into an impossibly deep wall. There are more buttons on the fascia than the average cockpit. Someone has attempted to replicate the Starbucks experience in a self-service machine, which might have stood a slim chance of half working if they hadn’t called it Coffee-2-Go. No one has bothered to do any market research around this machine because they would have found out, really very quickly, that the best kind of coffee machine is one that has one button marked ‘coffee’ and one cup size marked ‘monolithic’. This is the brand of frustration the average services excels at.
Take the toilets. For the most part clean and tidy, they are always accompanied by some celebratory wall of certificates congratulating the manager of the bogs for ensuring there are no visible skid marks on show. You wash your hands, you dry your hands and read an advert posted directly above the hand dryer for some DVD pyramid scheme that goes something like, ‘If you don’t sign up with us, at all, ever, we’ll give YOU £10 just to receive a DVD from us!’ This irks you because you know that it’s total bollocks and you also know that they know it’s total bollocks but there’ll be enough people wondering how such bollocks works who will ring the big red number on the poster to find out more about the bollocks only to find out a month later that they have been charged on their mobile bill for a £10/min phone call just after midnight in a place that had zero visible skid marking.
When you have to go, you have to go
Feeling thoroughly cheesed off, you exit the toilets and are then confronted by three big yellow faces: ‘happy’, ‘not sure’, and ‘sad’. ‘Please take our survey’ it says above the faces. To begin with, you wonder who would push the ‘not sure’ face, as if registering your ambivalence towards the facilities of an M6 services is going to fix any of the general entropy of the universe that will eventually lead to our destruction. Secondly, you can’t help noticing how the ‘happy’ face is dented from where it’s been punched repeatedly, and the ‘sad face’ is stained from where dissatisfaction has been expressed, again repeatedly, most likely several times by a single party. The tragedy is you understand this, and you move on for fear of losing it and spending the rest of the night alternating between staining the ‘sad’ face and battering the ‘happy’ face.
Happy or sad?
Munching on your Ginsters pasty and extra-milky-white-three-sugars-and-cinammon ultra small coffee, already feeling slightly woozy from the combination of unsaturated fats and uncommon caffeine, you make your way to your car past the bloke who has just finished off his porn movie at the Travelodge and is now leaning against his executive saloon for a celebratory cigarette and, probably, a good old cry. Thank god you’re not him. You’re going home. It’s still five hours drive away and it’s already past midnight, but this is the last stop you’ll be making until you run out of petrol.
What have been your experiences of a service station at night? Why not let us know!
