Egyptian vending machine – 2; Stranix – Goose Egg

It’s 10:30 on Monday morning in the Egyptian Building. You’ve managed to make it through the first two and a half hours of class without falling into the sweet arms of sleep and have managed to fit a surprising amount of borderline legible notes among your collage of doodles in the margins of your syllabus. You can’t keep your eyes open for much longer, though, and have already caught your head mid-nod twice only to awkwardly jerk yourself back awake and creep out your neighbors. In an effort to stave off a third lapse of consciousness (also because your neighbor has just noticeably shifted as far away from you as their chair allows and you want to get out of there before things get too weird) you walk up the incline to the lobby to grab a Pepsi. It’s one of those new looking machines with the giant hand-sized buttons you can punch that makes you feel like this soda is going to taste better than the ones that come out of the older, inferior Pepsi machines with the buttons that only fit a few finger tips. You put in your dollar and dig up a quarter from your pocket (good thing you wore the same pants from yesterday) and try to decide which of the two diet Pepsi buttons will give you the better beverage. After some mental coin-flipping, you give a right-hook to the left button and two seconds later your 20oz’s of academic fuel drops into view. Man this is going to be one of those sodas that produces the completely satisfied AHHH… after that first delicious sip... What!? Hold the phone… This bottle feels like it’s just come out of the devil’s own oven. When did we start microwaving cola around here? This is a farce wrapped in lies and deceit and surrounded by conundrums of all shapes and sizes. You refuse to trust your sense of touch and take that first sip anyways only to have the most unsatisfying mouthful of warm soda in your entire life. You force yourself to swallow so no one else in the lobby will see you make a scene and then discretely check the machine… yep… it’s definitely on. As your confusion slowly fades to frustration you drag yourself back to your seat with a plastic bottle filled with hot soda and pure disappointment. You sit through the rest of class, but you’re not listening. Oh no sir’ee… you’re thinking about the best ways to get back at a vending machine….

Two weeks later you try it again thinking “There’s no gosh darn way in heck this thing can’t be fixed yet…”

Scoreboard: Egyptian vending machine – 2; Stranix – Goose Egg