For some reason I have never got on well with vending machines. Normally
pretty friendly for your average joe, whenever I approach they seem to
don some Machevellian guise with the result that I have, over the years,
enjoyed many a cup of Oxtail Chocolate and Tomato soup with Lemonade and
extra sugar. I have other problems with these machines as well - problems
well known to the experienced incompetent.
The Revengeful Tilt occurs when you have successfully inseminated the
requisite coins of the realm into the machine and the plastic cup, like
a young adolescents testes, drops successfully into the loading bay. But
you have, if only for a second, glanced away and the cup has landed in
the loading bay at an angle. The resulting liquid, whether it be orange
squash and Bovril or chicken and Earl Gray, is than seen to be pouring
down the cup pushing it into a horizontal position. Rushing in to save
what you can, your hands are scalded by whatever grotesque melange the
machine has decided to come up with. Now I can understand that the
machine must get bored churning out the same old staples every day. But
why does it choose me experiment on? Whenever I approach it decides
it's a bloody Robert Carrier cocktail shaker.
The Missing Grail, on the other hand, is just plain revengeful. I stand
there having completed all the necessary procedures: the right liquid
come pouring out...the problem is, there's no sodding cup. If I had to
take Holy Communion from a vending machine it would give me not the body
and blood of Christ but a fountain of Coke and a chocolate bar.
Another trick vending machines play on me is to always give me completely
the wrong product. I decide, for example, that I want a Twix (having
chosen from the charming array of topless sweets in the glass display)
and I press the Twix button, only to be presented with a packet of
stomach churning cheesey wafers...Now, has this machine decided,
following Hegel's rigid logical analysis, that I have been brainwashed
into wanting a Twix? And that what I actually desire and indeed require
(if only nutritionally) is a cheesy wafer? Or is it just winding me up
again? Is it just playing silly buggers? I think that the machine is not
at all interested in the Hegelian dialectic and it's relationship to
free will and personal freedom. No, it's actually much more interested in
Alfred North Whitehead's notion that everything is really everything else
in the final philosophical analysis. And as the universe is really just a
great big thought (or a great big Twix) it shouldn't really matter
whether I actually consume one of those stomach churning cheesy wafers or
a luscious Twix because, in that final analysis, cheesy wafers and Twix
are, in fact (or fiction) merely emanations from David Bohm's implicit
order explicated from the flowing ground which is 'external suchness.'
But when all's said and done you can take all that fine smelling philo-
sophy and all that 'new physics' rubbish and dig it into Iris Murdoch's
allotment because in my final analysis I know what I want...And that's
a bloody Twix!
So, standing patiently at the machine thinking that i have found the
solution to the little philosophical games that the machine has decided
to play with me, I press the button marked 'cheesy wafer' on one machine
and the buttons marked 'Oxtail' and 'Chocolate' on the other.
I then wait patiently like some confident player in the Glass Bead Game
for my philosophical rewards (a Twix and a cup of Columbian after-dinner
roast). And, miraculously, both machines work perfectly. One gives me a
stomach churning wafer, the other a steaming cup of Oxtail Chocolate.
The incompetent has failed, again.
