Insert Coins Here

At work, we moved into a new office building during the summer. On our floor there's a break room with a wall of windows and a nice view of the campus. It's a very pleasant room. Up until a couple of weeks ago, there were empty spots along one wall -- room for two more refrigerators, I thought. Then vending machines appeared. There's a soft drink machine, that isn't quite right yet (a co-worker told me if I wanted water to select ginger ale, and if I wanted ginger ale to select Sprite), and another machine that at least when I last saw it on Friday was still empty. Presumably it will eventually be filled with snacks -- potato chips and Hershey bars and trail mix and salted peanuts -- but at the moment it is empty. But it's been turned on, and the inside is illuminated, the chrome racks inside gleaming, and blue lights on the control panel sequentially turning on and off, over and over, urging you to insert your money and make your selection. It's hypnotic, really, those lights. But there isn't anything in the machine, so it doesn't seem right that it keeps demanding that we insert money. (Although a co-worker suggested that perhaps it wasn't empty, but that the snacks were just really small; perhaps our employer has insisted on extreme portion control from the vendor.)

This Vending Machine Encounter got me thinking about other Notable Vending Machines I Have Known. Last summer when we were in Chicago, Caroline and Sarah and I went to the Chicago Cultural Center to see an exhibit; while we were there, we wandered through the first floor reading room and got something to drink at the snack bar. Somewhere on the first floor there was a vending machine that caught our eye. It had previously vended cigarette packs, in another life, but now it dispensed small Works of Art (or at least Crafts) in cigarette-pack-sized boxes. The machine took tokens that you had to purchase at the shop; I think they were $5. It was tough for the girls to make their selection; you didn't get to see what was in your box, only select a category. Sarah got an ornament on a string (was it a harlequin? I don't remember for sure) and Caroline a necklace, a polished stone on a string.

The first time I saw a vending machine that sold small Works of Art was in Durham, North Carolina, when I lived there in the mid-1980s. At the Carolina Theater downtown there was a vending machine that sold bits of art for a dollar (the price of everything has gone up since the 1980s). This was more like a machine that might have sold sandwiches in a previous life, so you did get to sort of see what you were getting before you purchased it. I was the proud owner of two color photocopies of pictures of Snap-on tool trucks. I assume there were more in the series, but I only had two of them. For a long time, they were framed and up on my wall, but I don't know what ended up happening to them.

Back to the vending machine in the break room. I find it unnerving, this gleaming illuminated machine with the insistent sequentially illuminating blue lights, demanding that I put in money, even though there's nothing in it. Hopefully, when I go back to work tomorrow, it will be full of granola bars and packets of M&Ms, and I won't have these feelings of existential dread any more, when all I wanted was to get myself a cup of coffee.

But if you want ginger ale, be sure to select the Sprite.