doodledee

Every time I go get something to eat or drink out of a vending machine I push the button a couple six times in the hopes that I'll somehow magically get more than one of whatever it is that I'm buying. I know it sounds stupid, but it's a habit I've carried around since I was a kid. See, back in the day, my neighborhood buddies and I used to ride our bikes down to Soldier's Field pool and go swimming quite a bit. You could swim all day for like $1. It was a great deal, even then. Add an extra $2 to that and you could even stop off at Mr. Pizza on the way home to soak up some A/C and get some garlic cheese bread and play a couple games of Super Sprint or, in the later years, a couple of games of Super Dodgeball. That game ruled. On a good day I could play for an hour on one quarter.

But I digress. Let's go back to the pool

Inside the "building" at the pool was a little snack bar and vending machine area. We never bought anything at the snack bar, but some of us would occasionally get something from the vending machine. Usually a 3-Musketeers because they were the biggest candybar around and if you were giving up your video game money for food, you better damn well get a substantive piece of candy. (Note: salted nut rolls were also an option because they were so filling.)

The vending machine in question was one of those old-school ones where you would see like 10 items lined up on these little angled shelves with a button above each one. You pushed the button above the one you wanted and the shelf it was on would kind of flip back and throw your candy into the collection area below. Then a new piece of candy would fall - as if from nowhere - and take the place of the one you just bought. It was so exciting.

But not as exciting as the day that this older kid told us how - if you kept pushing the button just exactly right - that the machine would keep flipping the shelf over and over again and keep dumping candybars out until it was empty. We obviously didn't believe he could do it, so he offered to show us.

He got it on his first try.

He must have taken home 25 Snickers that day.

He gave one to each of us.

He was a god.

We tried for years to reproduce what we'd seen. In dozens and dozens of attempts we maybe got the machine to give up multiples a small handful of times. And we never came close to emptying the machine; I think our best was maybe a triple.

So that's why I do it.

I believe.