Calling Mr. Goldberg

In the office there is a food vending machine of the kind one used to commonly find in bus stations and suchlike places where the necessities of waiting and frugality (and the non-availability of such personnel as might otherwise take money and serve food) made the idea of an automated dispenser of comestibles an inviting business proposition; they are all we have left of the automat -- the shabby stepchild of what once appeared to be the model for America's dining future. There has been no discernable evolution in the design of these machines since the early seventies.

One of these lives in the kitchen/lounge at the office. Next to the towering, aggressively slick Coke machine, the food machine seems to slump; its internal flourescent lights give it the greyed appearance of a man whose white shirt has been washed too many times. This specimen has the usual inventory of rigorously preserved food. Individually packaged portions of cereal. Milk in cartons reminiscent of a grade-school cafeteria. Forbidding-looking pot pies ready for a microwave finish, pastry that looks to have been made of extruded polyvinyl, and apples which have the dull shine of industry.

But it doesn't matter that the food looks like its going to taste like something a DOD logistics analyst commissioned for the troops shipping out to Indochina in 1965 -- it's the delivery system that fascinates. The machine provides its own reason for being; the pleasures of observing and operating the mechanism, with its ingenious set of rotating trays, coy peek-a-boo windows and miniature doors. It invokes an advent calendar, or that wall of doors on Laugh-In. One pays for these felicities in the guise of a cheese sandwich (on "bread" that probably never went through a process remotely like what you picture as "baking"). Each item lives in its snug little apartment until it is chosen; garishly backlit for maximum effect. Old stock footage of conveyor belts whisking consumer goods through a factory; the allure of Milton-Bradley's old Mousetrap game; even Tom Clancy descriptions of some lumbering piece of destructive might cycling through its intricate processes; all of these things touch us in the same mysterious fashion.

It is a curious corollary that we are hopeless at any kind of mechanical repair work whatsoever.

Posted by BT at April 09, 2002 04:57 PM