Gas Went Up And I Asked AI for One No.

Gas jumped about thirty cents around here inside of a week.

Now I’m retired. I’m not driving to work anymore. But I still run all over this county, and thirty cents a gallon adds up over a month whether you’re punching a clock or not.

So I had a simple question. There’s a station out past the bypass that’s usually a good bit cheaper than the one four blocks from my house. Is it worth driving out there to fill up, or am I burning up the savings getting there?

That’s it. That’s the whole question. One number at the end of it — worth it, or not worth it.

I asked the machine.

And what I got back was an education.

It told me about crude oil markets. It told me about refinery capacity and seasonal blend changes. It explained that gas prices vary by region due to state taxes and distribution costs. It gave me a nice little section on how to improve fuel economy — check your tire pressure, don’t idle, remove excess weight from the trunk.

All of it true. Every word of it accurate. I’d have given it a passing grade in a classroom.

And not one line of it answered what I asked.

I didn’t want to know why gas costs what it costs. I wanted to know whether to turn left or right out of my driveway.

That’s a particular kind of aggravation. It’s not wrong. It didn’t lie to me. It stayed right on the topic the whole way and never once did the job.

I keep a list of these habits the machine has that turn a two-minute question into a twenty-minute one.

Here’s why it does it.

It’s answering the average version of your question instead of yours. Somewhere in everything it ever read, “gas prices” came attached to articles about crude oil and fuel economy tips. So that’s what it reaches for. It’s giving you the most common answer to a question shaped like yours, rather than the answer to the one you actually asked.

And it will never tell you it did that. It hands you the general article with the same confidence it would hand you the real answer.

Let me show you the two sides of it.

Without the fix, it goes like this. You ask whether the cheap station is worth the drive. You get four paragraphs on why fuel prices fluctuate. You read all of it, because it sounds like it’s getting somewhere. You finish it knowing more about refineries than you did and exactly as much about your own errand as when you started. Then you make the call the same way you always did — guessing.

With the fix, it goes like this. You ask the same thing. It says: I need two numbers from you. How far out is that station, and how big is your tank. You tell it eleven miles and sixteen gallons. And it says: at a forty-cent difference you save about six dollars forty on a fill. Twenty-two miles round trip at your mileage costs you roughly two dollars in gas. So you come out ahead by four and change — but only if you’re filling up most of the tank. If you’re topping off five gallons, don’t bother, you’re driving for two dollars.

That’s an answer. You can act on that. It took two questions and about nine seconds, and now you know something about your own life instead of about the oil industry.

One of those is a magazine article. The other one is somebody helping you.

Here’s the fix, and it’s yours free whether you ever come back here or not.

When you ask the question, put this in front of it:

Answer for my situation, not the general one. If you’re missing something you need, ask me for it first.

That’s the whole thing.

The second half matters as much as the first. Without it, the machine will fill the holes in what it knows about you with averages, and hand you a confident answer built on a person who isn’t you. Told to ask instead, it asks. Two questions and it’s working on your problem.

And this works on anything where the answer depends on your particulars. Whether to fix the mower or replace it. Whether that rebate is actually worth the paperwork. Whether to take the earlier flight. All of those have a general answer that’s useless and a specific answer that’s worth having.

Now that one line fixes one bad habit. There are a couple dozen more like it written down in a file I put on this site for nothing. Both PDFs sit at the bottom of this page.

But here’s what that file actually is.

One of those rules gets you a better answer. All of them together change who’s running the conversation.

One fix and the machine behaves for a minute. The whole list and it quits handing you the average and starts working on your business.

I drove out to the bypass, by the way. Came out about four dollars ahead and got a decent cup of coffee out of the trip.

Four dollars isn’t much. But I knew it was four dollars before I turned the key, and that’s the part I was after.

I can see clearly now.

This post was drafted with AI governed assistance and reviewed and directed by Michael S. Faust Sr. before publication.

Contact: micvicfaust@gmail.com

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