D8 (Man vs. Machine)

         Two quarters and a dime, each with it's own unique series of clinks, fell into the machine.  Drew looked over the possibilities, again.  Was it pepper flavored pork rinds or nacho cheese flavored tortilla chips?  Maybe a chocolate covered conglomeration of peanuts, held firmly together with plenty of caramel flavored gelatin?  The previous decision was upheld, D8, the pork rinds.

         This should have been a simple matter, a task completed thousands of times a day, by people, children even, all over the world.  The buttons were there, clearly separated.  The letters and numbers that denoted their values, white on a black background, were typed in a serf font for easy recognition.  Drew pressed the D, he pressed the 8, then waited and watched for the spiral that held his deep fried snack to spin.  Nothing.  All of the machines moving parts, frozen.  He pressed the keys again, harder than they needed to be perhaps, or perhaps not, as nothing happened for the second time.

         "Oh, come on," came from the man before the intricately fabricated box of metal and plastic, as if the phrase might appeal to it's sense of good will and cause it to re-think it's refusal to relinquish the treat.  Then he pressed the buttons again, in the proper combination.

         But the box did not act, it stood still, sat silent, as if Drew hadn't pressed the D, hadn't pressed the 8.  As if he hadn't pressed them in the proper order after depositing the required fare, hadn't pressed them, thrice.  Drew quickly jumped to the next conclusion, a defensive measure really, a conclusion jumped to by hundreds of millions a minute whenever faced with an unexpected, simple to solve, problem:  The machine ate his money due to a malfunction.  It is human nature to hold responsibility for negative circumstances at arms length, Drew was no exception.

         He had seen it before of course.  The machine in question operated within specific tolerances and in predictable ways.  As the coins are placed into the slot on a panel located in the upper right quadrant of the face plate, they slide down one of seven channels.  Which channel any given coin will use was based on weight.  When a coin of proper mass ran over a trap door in the master channel, leading to the external slot, it would fall into the appropriate side channel, causing a circuit to be completed.  The electric pulse was recorded by a small CPU, and when the proper number and type of pulses was received, the device would trigger, and allow the release of the chosen morsel.  The trap door design was not without it's failings, and, occasionally, the angle of attack gravity used on a given coin would cause a given trap door to not open completely, refusing the completion of the circuit.  Therefore, some coins would get by unrecorded.  The complex nature of this reasoning was lost on Drew.  He had seen it before.

         He inserted two more quarters and another dime.  His listened for the satisfying clink as they hit the collecting pan, then looked at the digital display to make sure they had been recorded properly this time.  The read-out was dead, Drew made a face.  He couldn't imagine his luck, or dis-luck, at using this particular machine.  One that was suffering two distinct malfunctions, simultaneously.  Often in this model of Supr-Vend devices the digital read-out was the first thing to go.  He was amazed at the irony of the matter, that the company he worked for would have a malfunctioning Supr-Vend in it's break room.  He decided that, with pork rinds in hand, he would place a service call, then he pressed D8.  Nothing happened.

         Occam was a philosopher of some note, who, at one point in his career, stated:  All things being equal, the most likely solution is the correct one.  So if an automobile is discovered missing one morning, it is more likely that it was stolen by local hoodlums for a  joy ride, then by troll-like sub-terrestrial monsters for their "Museum of Wonders".  In the same vein, if a vending machine was not vending, it was more likely that it was unplugged, then that some obscure malfunction in it's internal workings was defeating the process by which it counted change, twice in a row, and that it's display had failed at the same time. 

         It would have served Drew to have balanced his education with philosophy.  He had gone to college for electrical engineering, and didn't hold liberal arts in high regard.  It also would have served him to study psychology, as some guy named Freud had once said:  One will find what one seeks.  As an electrical engineer, Drew was seeking an electrical engineering problem.  He was also getting mad.

         Anger is an emotion, emotion being the opposite of reason.  Occam, being a logician, spun in his grave, causing several of his badly decomposed bones to break and giving three corpse worms a very bad scare, when Drew punched the front of the machine.  With gritted teeth, he pressed the D and the 8 over and over in rapid succession.  When that failed to yield results, he began pushing other combinations, not caring what fell into the ergonomic, yet secure, tray at the bottom, so long as something fell.  When none of the assorted candies or confections conceded, Drew quickly concluded conspiracy.  He grabbed the offending instrument of commercial distribution and shook it with the anger of the falsely accused. 

         It was a poor move.  Every machine produced by Supr-Vend had a sign visibly posted on the upper right panel, just above the slot for coins.  It was a risk management induced declaration, a plausible denial of liability for any injury caused by use of the machine not in compliance with acceptable practices.  It stated, clearly, in bold, white, serf font on a black background:  DO NOT SHAKE OR TILT MACHINE!  Death or serious injury can occur,  machine will not dispense free product.  It even had a picture of a person, only a silhouette to protect the innocent from accusation, captured in mid-air beneath the falling machine.  Under the image, the bold warning was reprinted in Spanish, or maybe French, it was hard to tell.  As with all things in the world, there was a reason these signs were produced and affixed to every machine.

         There are many thousands of reported cases, a year, of people being injured or killed by vending machine related accidents.  Most of these, caused by attempted theft, could be considered karmic in nature.  But if stealing candy is punishable by being crushed by an eight hundred pound box filled with junk food, then what does karma have in store for congressmen?  Therefore, it is more likely that people tilt these machines off their balance, not understanding the weight dynamic of such a behemoth, and are summarily caught as the hulks change course toward the center of the Earth.  Not karma, just physics mixed with stupidity.

         Stupidity is not covered by karma.  If it were, once again, what's in store for congressmen?  But it is covered by physics, as Drew discovered when his enemy began falling forward.  Physics dictates that any given object accelerates toward the center of the Earth at nine point eight meters per second, squared.  This figure is drawn at sea level, but varies little at 239 feet above sea level, the elevation at which Drew currently cowered.  If a standing object falls, dead flat, in an arc towards the ground, the top of it will be affected by the mass of the rest of itself falling.  It acts sort of like a lever, the whole of the object hits the ground at the average speed all of it's parts were able to accelerate to.  The parts closest to the ground gain very little velocity because they have so short a distance to accelerate, the top parts, however, make up for their under-achievement. 

         That being said, it's easy to understand how the top of something six feet tall, falling in such a way, will reach approximately forty-five miles per hour before hitting the ground.  It's important to note that the Supr-Vend machine was eight feet tall.  Drew attempted at the last second to escape his doom, but only managed to twist his upper body slightly before he was knocked off balance by his unforgiving inanimate obsession. 

         His last moments were not filled with a slide show of his thirty nine years on the planet.  While many would use this time to reflect on the nature of happiness or call a quick prayer to their imaginary friend, Drew's mind was a flurry of calculations.  Just before he turned, he noticed that the lights in the case, that normally lit the products, weren't on.  This was not a possibility.  He knew for a fact that those lights never went out.  They had low wattage, florescent bulbs that would outlast civilization.  Their wiring was so simple as to be intuitive.  He knew this because he had tested them himself, knew this because he had designed them, ten years ago, as his first project for Supr-Vend.  He put together his actions with the responses, or lack there of, from the machine, and realized just how badly wrong he had been at every turn.  As the mass of it came down on him, his head was forced to the side and back, as if the Supr-Vend wanted him to know, wanted him to see, that indeed, it had been unplugged the entire time.  And as the machine broke several of his ribs, one of his collar bones, and his back in three places, as it caused two of those ribs to puncture his left lung, and one of his vertebrae to sever his spinal cord in an extremely vital area, killing him instantly, it did not dispense free product.