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The lawsuit I recently filed against the MAPCO gas station chain, owned by Majors Management, centers on it collecting taxes on items exempt from sales tax. There’s plenty of details and specifics the lawsuit covers, but for today, I’d like to start by showing a few small examples. Here’s one transaction:

The first line shows transaction details such as the time and date, transaction ID and total collected. Don’t worry, none of the information I’m showing is personally identifiable, I wouldn’t leak people’s credit card numbers or anything like that.

Smartwater is a brand of bottled water. In Ohio, water is not eligible for sales tax. MAPCO collected $0.53 in “tax” on this $7.78 sale of bottles of water anyway. Later the same day, we see:

I was going to make a few posts about the start of my journey with the MAPCO company, but something else came up first. Lots of people say they’ll sue their employers when they quit/get fired, but I actually did. The case number is V-2026-03-1019, filed in Summit County Court, Ohio.  A copy of the complaint can be viewed here.

I’ll discuss some of the details in future posts, but as a preview, here’s how it begins:

I created this website because I like to journal. I find writing down my thoughts helps me process things in a productive way. I had just started a new job so my plan was to document my thoughts and feelings about it. The job was nothing special, just a gas station job, but I thought it was cool the company’s policies explicitly said they wouldn’t police anything their users said online.

Most companies tell employees they can’t say anything bad about the company. They use threatening language suggesting you might be fired for the slightest negative remark. This company went the other way, and I thought that was cool. I decided to embrace the freedom the company offered its employees, registered a domain name, set up a WordPress installation and… got screwed.

Right as I was about to push the website to live, the company updated its employee handbook. Suddenly there was a section saying:

So I gave up. I shelved the website and put drafts of a dozen posts away in storage where nobody but me would ever see them. I was sad and frustrated, but hey, odds are nobody would have read my journal entries anyway.

That was six months ago. I quit the job last week. Now I’m going to share some of my old journal entries. Odds are nobody will read them. But hey, if anyone does… hi!

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