No problem? No problem.

Don't try to fill 'er up in Nashville right now.

Last Friday morning, unconfirmed reports of a gasoline shortage started circulating. No one knows how the rumors got started, but local media picked up the gossip and long lines began forming at stations throughout middle Tennessee.

By evening rush hour, less than 10% of Nashville-area retailers had gas left to sell -- in an eight-hour span when most folks were at work, a city of 600,000 essentially ran itself out of gas.

Residents limped through last weekend by car-pooling or staying home. Gas stations aren't expecting deliveries until today or tomorrow.

Nashville wasn't struck by a natural disaster. Before the rumors took hold, there was no critical shortage of fuel. Like much of the Southeast and Midwest, thanks to hurricanes Gustav and Ike, the city was dealing with reduced supplies, but the situation was manageable.

Then came the rumors, and panic-buying overtook the city. At that point, all bets were off.

Nashvillians have no one but themselves to blame, of course, but the rest of us shouldn't feel too smug -- an irrational "run" like this can happen anywhere, any time and with any commodity.

After the remnants of Ike blew through central Ohio a week ago, a low-grade version of the Nashville panic unfolded right here, as stores quickly sold out of typical disaster-related items. Still, my family and I didn't have to pay high prices or wait in line -- because our approach, to coin a phrase, is "cache-and-carry (on)."

Think about it -- anyone with a garage or a utility shed probably has a safe place to cache at least 20 gallons of gasoline. We add a couple of ounces of Sta-bil to each five-gallon can and rotate our stock through the lawn tractor, refilling containers as they're emptied.

Spending four bucks on a shrink-wrapped flat of bottled water every trip to the grocery quickly adds up to an emergency stockpile; the same principle can be applied to accumulating stores of non-perishable food. Tossing each day's pocket change into a jar, then rolling the coins and stashing them away, answers the question, "What do I do if nobody's taking credit cards and all the ATMs are down?"

It ain't rocket science.

When we hear "preparedness," we usually think of getting ready for natural disasters like hurricanes or ice storms, or a man-made calamity like a chemical spill or even a terrorist attack. But as the Nashville scenario demonstrates, unprepared and panic-prone Americans are quite capable of creating their own crises.

The same rules apply. Prepare -- now.