It’s Hard to Believe Some of These Are Truly “Unintentional”

Yeah, I know. This is one of those posts where I don’t really add anything of value. I just link to someone else’s page and hope that some of the goodness rubs off on me. It’s a personal blog; what are you expecting here?

The top 10 unintentionally worst company URLs

Ode to the Greatest Vending Machine (reprise)

Recently I discussed the most gratifying vending experience of my life. Said vending machine continues to surprise and delight. I had the same experience this morning where my candy bar got stuck in the coil. I didn’t panic. I looked calmly over at the display and saw that I still had a $.75 credit. I selected E6 again, and the coil made another rotation, dropping my candy bar to the retrieval area… as well as a second candy bar!

Sorry about the mix up, Clay. Here’s a second candy bar for your trouble. Thanks for doing business with me.

Customer service has been automated. Or maybe it was just a fluke of what is obviously a poorly designed coil.

Vending Machine in the Stairwell Nearest My Cubicle, I salute you. Again.

Ode to the Greatest Vending Machine

Most of the times I’ve used a vending machine, I haven’t encountered any trouble at all.  Yesterday was different.  I deposited three quarters and selected E6.  So far, so good.  The metal coil that held my candy bar captive spun slowly but surely, in the process moving my sugary confection closer to the clear plastic I am probably meant to assume is glass.  Just as it was about to reach the precipice and tumble to the bottom of the machine, into the reach of my grubby paws, the turning stopped.

I had been listening for the familiar thunk of a heavy bar of chocolate landing from a fall of several feet.  That thunk never came.  I gazed into the bowels of what I was just beginning to recognize as a malevolent piece of automation, and saw my tasty snack leaning towards me, but firmly lodged in the clutches of that metal coil.

I tried a few experimental nudges of the machine (from a running start) but to no avail.  I resigned myself to drawing three more quarters from my pocket and inserting them into this tyrannical box that tempted me with attractively displayed packages of fat and sugar only to deny me their procurement.

It was then I noticed the display on the machine was showing I had a credit of $.75.  In light of the fact that I selected E6 and watched that damnable metal coil turn, this simply didn’t make sense.  Digging through the folds of my memory, though, there had only been silence after I made my selection.  While I didn’t hear the satisfying landing of my tasty treat in the hand-accessible bin, I also didn’t hear the soul-crushing landing of my precious quarters coming to rest in the quarter-laden bowels of my insatiable antagonist.

I can only conclude that someone had dreamed up the rational and intoxicating idea of installing a sensor in the bottom receptacle of the machine.  If this sensor isn’t triggered, then my credit remains, unsullied.  Is a scale busily counting ounces when individually wrapped morsels of food drop to that weigh station on the road to immaculate consumption?  Perhaps a light beam is broken?  It doesn’t really matter.  What matters is I received my candy bar in accordance with the unspoken agreement between that vending machine and I that the price label it presented for item E6 was something more than mere decoration.  It was a declaration.  We had entered into a covenant that I could distort my blood sugar, possibly adversely affecting my dinner, for $.75.  No more.  No less.

Vending Machine in the Stairwell Nearest My Cubicle, I salute you.

If You Treat People Like Children…

For most businesses, a set of policies grows over time.  Whenever something bad happens, you create a rule to make sure it doesn’t happen again.  By the time a business gets really big, it’s usually developed a byzantine list of policies to address things that probably weren’t going to happen again anyway.  The guys at 37signals suggest a different approach.

Some of the leases I signed in college were victims of this same phenomenon.  Because of a problem they had experienced with one tenant years ago, a lease I signed included a clause saying that I would never have any candles lit on the property for the entire year I lived there.  (Birthday cake, anyone?)  Everyone knew this was absurd.  The employee who handed me the lease even pointed out that they didn’t really expect us to never light a candle.  The fact that they included such a trivial (and largely unenforceable) clause in the contract made me question what else in the lease didn’t need to be taken seriously.  Sure they included legal gobbledygook stating that if one part of the lease turned out to be worthless, then everything else would still stand.  I’m not a judge, though.  So what I walked away from that lease signing thinking is that these people expect me to ignore some of the rules.  I know they had an expectation that I would instinctively know which rules belonged on the list to take seriously and which belonged on the list to only break behind closed doors.  I wonder if our lists were the same?