10:38 a.m. - 2003-01-14
dr. a+
There's this coke machine down the street from my girlfriend's house...and by coke machine I don't mean a Coke-Brand machine, this one dispenses a variety of Albertson's A+ sodas. Which I guess are somehow inferior, but I don't really drink sodas usually, so I don't know; and plus they only cost a quarter, which strikes me as a nice old-timey price to pay for a whistle wetting. Anyway, my relationship with this vending unit predates my girlfriend's moving in to the neighborhood. I discovered it on a lunch break during a gig in Mt. Washington years ago, and every time I return to the area I seem to end up in front of it. Why is that, you ask? Well, you know those square plastic buttons you press to make your selection? In addition to all the usual soda choices, one button on this machine used to sport a handwritten tag that read only 'SURPRISE'.
"How fun is this!" I remember thinking when I first saw it, "I guess they take all the random, leftover, cans and stock 'em higgledy-piggledy in the surprise bin!"
Whereupon I dropped coin and made my first 'SURPRISE' selection (unaware that this simple transaction would mark the beginning of a long, complicated, relationship w/this vending unit). Lemon-lime, I got. Twice in a row, even. Not my fave, but hey that's what surprise is all about, right?
Five months later, sitting in the Albertson's parking lot, drinking like, the fortieth consecutive lemon-lime I'd dispensed with a touch of the same 'SURPRISE' button, it hit me. Disbelief and disappointment are modes of surprise! And actually, when one construes an advertised "surprise" as indicative of unforeseeable-but-fun product variety, then a monotonous, predictable, outcome constitutes an even greater "surprise"...
Weeks later they temporarily sold out of surprise-lemon-lime, so I opted to try a soda called Dr. A+...and discovered that depressing that particular selection button yielded two cans per quarter. Two! Abandoning my masochistic fascination w/the 'SURPRISE' button, I developed a taste for Dr. A+. Maybe I should have felt guilty, always taking two for a quarter, but those were heady days; my pockets full of extra coins, my belly sloshin' with generic Dr. Pepper. It all came crashing down, of course. Two months later I dropped coin, hit the Dr. A+ button, and got nothing. Zippo. No out of service light, no response from the other buttons. I immediately tried another quarter. I mean, once it dispensed two cans I would break even, right? Nothing. Had I kept better records, had I any sort of soda-consumption accounting system in place I could tell you whether, after weeks of dropping coin and pressing in vain that once generous dispenser of illicit extra-cannage, I had retroactively paid for every free soda.
I suspect I'm the hole...
So I went back to the 'SURPRISE' button, which now reads 'FRUIT PUNCH' and dispenses root beer exclusively. I like root beer well enough. Not as much as fruit punch, but y'know. Surprise.
