Upon reading this suggestion for a blog the first thing that popped into my head was a vending machine, I think vending machine interactions are some of the most interesting interactions that take place in a public realm. Sure it seems simplistic but if you have ever sat and watched the stories unwravel between people and vending machines, it can be quite comical and sometimes insightful. Take for instance, just yesterday I was on a 10 minute break during a long class, one of the most crowded times at the vending machine I am pretty sure, and I walk into a scene that was quite uncomfortable to be honest. There were two guys there, one of them with his arms wrapped around the vending machine shaking and wrestling with it, the other kicking the front of it and giving instruction to the shaker, and of course, there was the bag of chips stuck at the top of the machine outside of the coils, but it was not coming down, and on the side of the vending machine, feeling just as awkward as I was I think, was another guy waiting to use the devil machine as was I. So we faced a sort of strange interaction, one with these guys, once they stopped shaking the machine, and another with the machine, should we choose the type of chips he chose to get his down and possibly get our own stuck in the same way he did? Or should we ignore his blatant struggle and choose something else to be on the safe side. In the end, neither of us chose the type of chips he had chosen, and he and his friend wondered back to class chipless. From this I have decided that people and vending machines in general have the most dysfunctional relationship to one another of all modern technology. Isn't there a better way?
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