The Taunting

Several weeks ago I was having a particularly bad day (today isn't going much better), so I decided to head down to ye olde break room. The break room consists of two soda pop machines, one candy machine, one refrigerated machine and one coffee machine. All of these used to be vintage; but within the last few months our company changed to a new vending vendor. Now all the vending machines have shiny new lights, pleasing green and blue colors, the ability to take credit cards, and funny little antennas that communicate my junk food preferences to the agri-industrial, oligarchical overlords.

Prices have gone up too. My favorite (take note overlords) has always been the Reese's peanut butter cups, and they were a hefty $0.85 for two standard cups, when they were in stock. With the new vendor, the price is now $1.00. That's $0.50 per cup. At the risk of showing my age, I think it's criminal that the fun and enjoyment I used to get out of four video games is now distilled into a few seconds of questionable culinary pleasure.

I make this point only to underscore that it was a really bad day. Bad enough that I was willing to trade in 60 minutes of 1980's Rygar for a few seconds of potential happiness.

Of course it's obvious what happened. I did not get my Reese's peanut butter cup. After I put in my crisp dollar bill and punched in 156 (or whatever the code was), I watched the little screw mechanism spin to hopefully drop my packet of bliss to the bottom of the vending machine. The problem was that the new vendor had installed that specific screw, and only that screw, BACKWARDS. Right before my eyes, mocking me, as only a vending machine can, my little happiness bomb of sugar and fat slowly slipped...further...away.

Some days are just like that.