Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Fear of Vending Machines

Okay, before you jump to conclusions it's not that when I see one I turn the other way & run away screaming. It's more that I get a bit anxious when using one. Hrmm.. that sounded a bit weird too. I think I can best explain where this comes about with one of my experiences. *flashback music & squiggly blurry lines*
About 3 years ago sometime in the spring (or was it summer? Well the weather as warm) of a glorious Friday afternoon I was at work looking out my window anxious about going out to dinner with some friends I haven't seen in a while. Suddenly, I start getting error messages all over my screen. "Cannot connect to database" "Server exited with error" I was bombarded with them. I started making phone calls to find out what the problem was. Turns out we had a major hardware malfunction where of the nodes just blew out. I was beyond pissed. The project that I was working on had to be finished by tomorrow morning and the systems are down. It would take a few HOURS before they would be able to restore it. The clock was ticking away and I KNEW I'd have to cancel my plans. It was about 7pm before they were able to bring everything back and I was aggravated, and hungry. I rummaged through my purse & I had ONE dollar. I walked down to the little lunch room area to the vending machines. I popped in my only dollar and pushed the code for a bag of chips. The little coil that holds the bags of junkfood twirled and just as my bag of chips was about to fall down to the chute, it stopped. Suspended in midair (okay it wasn't midair, but I think it was caught on the coil) the damn thing taunted me. I banged on the plexiglass a bit hoping it would free my poor bag of chips, but it didn't. I was going to walk away and give up on it, but I decided to turn back to try to free it again. I looked around the room and down the hallway. No one was there, only frickin' losers who were stuck at work and had deadlines in the morning like me would be here at this hour. Arrgghhh... come on! My last frickin' dollar!!~ I lunged at the machine, threw my arms around it & tried to shake it. Nothing I did was going to free my precious bag of chips. Defeated, I let out a growl and kicked the machine & I heard a "pop" and the lights in the machine went out, OMG I think I broke it. Then I heard people coming from down the hallway. I was sooo embarrassed I ran away, I think they heard my..ermmm wrestling match. When I came back to work on Monday morning there was a piece of paper stuck on the machine that read "Out of Service". It remained that way for almost a week, and the whole the my bag of chips was still there, suspended, mocking me.
I think back on this now & chuckle a bit. I probably looked like such a lunatic wrestling machine, yeah, all 5'2" of me. So that's where my fear of using the vending machine comes from. Every time I've had to use a vending machine since then, (which was probably like 4x max) it brings bad memories, and I'm afraid that the chips, candybar whatever it was I'd pressed the code for would get stuck.

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