Did it last week, and I mean really did it – £20-odd quids worth in before i noticed. The different sized nozzle thing works to an extent – but its only a one way thing, people are much less likely to put diesel into a petrol than the other way around.
Its the second time I’ve done it, just been tired and pre-occupied on both occations. The first time the the pump handle was green, but the advert on it was for mars bars, so to look at it was mostly black. The diesel nozzle next to it had a green advert on the handle.
This time round I’d been running around in a hire car the previous week, so had this little mantra in my head still reminding me not to use the diesel.
This would be a be a useful application for Murphy’s Law – His real law, not the one that people mis-quote. The story behind that is facinating incidentally and involves Murphy accidently putting a test pilot in a coma, but i digress. His law is “If there are more than one ways of doing something and one of those ways ends in catastophy then design that catastrophy out. In his case it wasn’t the fact that he nearly killed someone that was the catastrophy (although it was an accident), his job was to measure the effects of G-Force, and his sensors had been mounted back to front and had recorded no data. So although he’d nearly killed a man, he hadn’t found out how much force would nearly kill a man, the test pilot was strained in vain. But Murphy realised that it shouldn’t have been possible too fit the sensors back to front in the first place.
Anyway the three pin plug is a application of that law, you physically can’t get the plug in the socket the wrong way round, and you shouldn’t be able to physically get petrol into a diesel or vice versa, no matter how dumb you are. Most people getting it right most of the time isn’t good enough.