G4B Bug...

It seems a number of gas station pumps have the “Gas at 4 Bucks” (G4B) bug:

Mom-and-pop service stations are running into a problem as gasoline marches toward $4 a gallon: Thousands of old-fashioned pumps can't register more than $3.99 on their spinning mechanical dials.

The pumps, throwbacks to a bygone era on the American road, are difficult and expensive to upgrade, and replacing them is often out of the question for station owners who are still just scraping by.

Many of the same pumps can count only up to $99.99 for the total sale, preventing owners of some SUVs, vans, trucks and tractor-trailers from filling their tanks all the way.

As many as 8,500 of the nation's 170,000 service stations have old-style meters that need to be fixed — about 17,000 individual pumps, said Bob Renkes, executive vice president of the Petroleum Equipment Institute of Tulsa, Okla.

I haven't seen this myself, but I have seen another phenomenon: gas pumps that limit the total purchase to $75. At $4+ a gallon (that's what we're paying in San Diego right now), that means I can't fill my gas tank at a single stop. I'm fairly certain this is an arbitrary limit configured into the pumps, but I've run into it at a surprisingly broad range of gas stations...