The joke's on who exactly?

Last week we had Back to the Future day--and I suppose it must be Back to the Future week--as the present caught up with the future envisioned in the past, and Marty McFly arrived in our time.

So there were many articles (and of course, listicules) comparing the envisioned 2015 in a Back to the Future movie,with this one, otherwise (and dubiously) known as "the real one."

One of the apparent misses in that vision was the 2015 gas station, in which robot arms fuels a car.  Maybe something like that happens with recharging electric vehicles, but no, we don't have robot arms pumping gas, sorry, got that one wrong.

Well, such a clueless comparison misses the entire joke, begun in the first Back to the Future movie, in which Marty returns to 1955.  One of the amazing sights he sees is an automobile pull into a gas station, and four uniformed attendants run out to gas up the car, check the oil, clean the windshield, etc.

Such things really did happen in the 1950s.  Maybe not three or four attendants, and maybe just a uniform shirt and/or cap, but one or two attendants did routinely take your gasoline order, clean the windshield, ask if you'd like the oil checked and take a look under the hood at your request.  Attendants did that in the 1960s and 70s, too.  Pumping gas was a respectable if not always enviable job, especially for young men.

But there were fewer and fewer gas jockeys anymore in the 1980s, after the oil shocks and gas lines and skyrocketed prices.  And pretty soon there were none. Drivers were expected to pump gas into their own cars, first as a money-saving option, then as the only option.  A task previously considered best left to professionals, and then as menial labor, not to mention dirty, smelly and possibly unsafe.

So the joke was, way back in the primitive 1950s, you didn't have to do that.  While in the modern 1980s you didn't have gas station attendants, you were your own attendant.

 And in the similar scene set in 2015 with the futuristic car fueled from robot arms, it was pretty much the same joke.  Because in 2015, we're still pumping our own gas. We don't have gas station robots because we don't need them. We are the gas station robots.

We're the mindless dummies pumping gas into our own cars to make more money for the oil companies and station owners.  Like those robots, we work for free.  But even better, we pay for our own maintenance.  We are the damn joke.