Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Are Vending Machine Designers Inherently Evil, Or Just Stupid?

We’ve all been there. Errrrrrrr….Urrrrrrrr. Errrrrrrrrr……Urrrrrrrr. That’s the sound of your dollar going in…then getting spit back out. Very annoying. It’s bad enough that I have to put up with this, but what really cramps my brain, is the WHY.

Physically what is happening is a scanner is looking at my dollar, then accepting or rejecting it. No system is perfect, and thus you will have some unjustified rejections from time to time. That’s not the problem. The problem is why is there a scanner in the first place.

At some point in the dollar accepting vending machine history, were people actually successful in sticking in pieces of paper or something? I doubt it. And even if that was happening, how thorough would the scanner have to be to detect the difference between printer paper and money? I mean, damn.


So here we have some idiot trying to prevent full on dollar counterfeiting. Did he really think something with the capital, brains, technology and chutzpah to counterfeit was going to go on some kind of all night vending machine spree, getting all the free Cokes he could stand? Really?! And even if he did, I mean, how many could you possibly drink or load before you either had to pee or someone noticed?


But the insanity of the situation doesn’t stop there. Because we have this highfalutin scanning technology, the price of the drinks has to go up to justify it. So I’m paying more to be more annoyed?! And some people just can’t take it. And they end up shaking the machine. And then dead. Perhaps a small subset of those movers and shakers mind you, but it is statistically possible to say that adding scanners to vending machines has directly lead to more deaths.


Way to go, techno-geek.


Preach on, brother Beavis!

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