Not bad for a company peddling an undifferentiated commodity. The only sign of life is the shiny-clean orange and yellow Pacific Pride logo on a single fuel pump on the side of the building. At three in the afternoon, a police patrol car pulls in. An officer gets out, inserts a plastic card, and begins to fill the car's tank. I'm on duty.
Downtime never happens.
Every day for 15 years, Pacific Pride's computers have polled all its members' fueling stations, and tabulated them without a single error or minute of downtime. Yet every technology choice the company has made in developing its networked-billing system goes against common wisdom about technology trends. Begin with the gas card itself, which authorizes the pump to start fueling the vehicle. The card doesn't have a magnetic stripe on the back, as credit cards do. Instead, it's full of holes, like the old keypunch cards used in the '50s.