In the building where I adjunct, there was a bottled water vending machine and I always stopped and bought a flavored Dasani before heading to class. Raspberry, grape, and lemon, all of which tasted exactly the same, a taste which you can replicate by throwing a Flintstone vitamin into a cup of tap water, swirling it around, and then letting it breathe in the fridge for an hour. On the one hand, it’s a three hour class, so having something to drink while I yammer on is, to say the least, pretty key to my ability to talk. But buying a bottle of the flavored Dasani before class became a little ritual and I am a man driven by his little rituals, whether or not I like to admit it. The equation became: What the hell am I supposed to talk about for three hours? + Buy terrible water = a kind of confidence, born from the signifying certainty that if the class went to hell, and all else too, at least there was one thing I actually made happen.
It was a pretty standard vending machine. Swiped my card, made my choice, the plastic bottle fell to the tray with an aurally perfect ka-CHUNK, and I reached in and pulled it out—always a brief wrestling match in which the machine tried to keep my hand—and unscrewed the bottle cap heading up the steps to my classroom. The first sip, taken a second before I walked in, I see even as I write this now, was a way in which I symbolically filled myself with the confidence I needed to present the material.
But this past semester, the school got rid of that vending machine. And replaced it with another kind. Less a vending machine and more of a droid with an attitude. Glass-fronted, with a robotic picker that slides with the whirr of servos, up and over to the aisle and row of the chosen drink. A little automatic foot kicks the bottle into the picker, the picker whizzes to the clear-plastic door, which slides away in a circular sweep, presenting the fresh bottle like a drinkable debutante.
None of which was, necessarily, a problem. What was the problem was two-fold. First, the flavored Dasani was gone. Replaced with boring dumb plain idiot water. And Coke, Sprite, and Dr. Pepper. Second, the machine had selected me as its enemy and had chosen not to fight me in the standard way of robot invaders, i.e. a slow-moving yet endless, massive, and taciturn wave of indestructible cyborgs. Irresistible and wholly alien head-on aggression. Pew, pew, pew! Blam-o!
To fight me, this machine selected passive aggression. At varying times throughout the semester, the card reader would pretend I hadn’t swiped my card. Please swipe card. <swipe> <pause> Please swipe card. At other times, the machine permitted the card swipe, and permitted me to press the button of the drink of my choice, but then chose for me whatever drink it wanted. Please swipe card. <swipe> <pause> <Coke> And the machine presented me with a bottle of icy plain boring stupid idiot normal water. Despite the several plainly visible rows of Cokes. “Sold-out” messages just after the machine had been stocked. “Cash only” messages in a for-all-intents-and-purposes cashless society. And, finally, just plain turned off and unplugged.
For class, then, about half the time throughout this past semester, I appeared before my class drink-less. And, while ultimately, I can raw-throat a lesson clear to the end if need be, the ritually instilled sense of self-assurance that came in that first swallow had been torpedoed. That which I question-less counted on had gone. It was, in front of these classes, only me, mustering a sense assurance over the material and my ability to present it from 100% nothing.
On the day of my very last class of the semester, I saw that the machine had returned to a seemingly working status. ‘And that, of course, figures completely,’ I thought. The pickings were slim, but hope springs eternal, and I swiped my card and made a selection. Moving like chastised little kid, though, the picker rose to a totally empty row and tried to vend me air. In the following half-second my brain shorted itself out as it tried to call to mind and simultaneously deliver every single cuss word I know. But, then: the picker moved from the empty row, back half and inch with a slight downcast orientation. And paused there, steeped, I saw, in the overwhelming weight of failure. The poignant, incisive sense of failure the comes from screwing up THE one thing you’re built to do. And then it moved to the next empty row. In which the exact same thing happened. And again too. Until it came to a row with Cokes and sheepishly, apologetically, penitently delivered me my very last drink of the semester.
Stupid machines. They can;t even do the one job they were created to do...at least, not without cussing at them.