California gas station manager fired after jaw-dropping price error

Drivers in Rancho Cordova, CA thought they saw a mirage last week.

A Shell station listed the price of gas at 69 cents a gallon. As you can imagine, people flocked to the pump for the miraculous discount after months of skyrocketing prices. After three hours, the station lost an estimated $16,000, Sacramento TV station KOVR reported.

And on Monday, John Szczecina lost his job.

Read more: Don’t lost your job over a social media post

“Well, it was a mistake that I did,” Szczecina, former manager at the station, told KOVR. He accidentally put a decimal in the wrong spot and began selling the $6.99 gallon of premium for just 69 cents.

His sister Paula Jackson has launched a GoFundMe with the goal of raising $16,000 the gas station lost in revenue and paying it back. It’s been four days since the campaign began, and only $650 has been raised as of Tuesday afternoon.

Jackson is also worried her brother could be sued, but business attorney Craig Zimmerman, based out of Torrance, CA, told KOVR that employees are protected from liability in cases where they make mistakes performing normal job duties. “The only way he would be responsible, absent a written agreement, is if he was acting outside the scope of his employment,” Zimmerman said. “For instance, if his boss said, ‘Whatever you do, don’t ever set the price on that gas pump.’ And then he did.”

However, a California doctor and nurse were recently sued for acting outside the scope of their licenses.

In Divino Plastic Surgery, Inc. et al. v. The Superior Court of San Diego County, a doctor performed an augmentation mammoplasty in his surgical clinic. The patient went into cardiopulmonary arrest during the surgery, remained intubated and unresponsive for about six weeks, then died.

In 2019, the patient’s surviving family members filed a complaint seeking damages from the clinic, the doctor, and the registered nurse who assisted during the surgery. The survivors alleged the following:

• The doctor told the patient that a licensed anesthesiologist would be there during the procedure to administer the anesthesia and to monitor her;
• The doctor and the nurse were the ones who actually administered multiple anesthetics despite lacking the license to do so;
• They failed to monitor the patient during the procedure;
• Although they performed cardiopulmonary resuscitation on the patient for around three hours without her consent, she never regained consciousness before her death.

In 2021, the survivors told the court that they wanted to amend their complaint by including a request for punitive damages and by adding certain factual allegations, including that the doctor misrepresented himself as a board-certified plastic surgeon and that the clinic hired an unlicensed medical assistant who administered local anesthesia to the patient.

The surviving family members made the following allegations:

• The doctor and his clinic did not qualify as healthcare providers under s. 425.13 of the Code of Civil Procedure because they were not licensed to provide the services in the manner alleged;
• The doctor, not being a licensed anesthesiologist, lacked the necessary training, skill, and experience to rescue the patient from an anesthesia overdose;
• The nurse acted outside her scope of her license by administering anesthesia without the doctor’s supervision;
• The medical assistant was not licensed or otherwise qualified to administer anesthesia.

To find out the outcome of the lawsuit, click here.