I have to vend my anger

Why is it that we keep opening ourselves up to be hurt over and over again in the same manner? Everybody does. Some people keep dating the same type of losers. Some bounce from dead end job to dead end job in an endless cycle of depression. In my case, I seem to allow myself to be hurt by over and over again by vending machine products.

I had thought that I had changed. I had moved on from the Welch’s orange juice and its refusal to offer as much of itself as I deserved. It was hard, but I moved on. And in some sense I think I grew.

After taking some time off from the vending machine scene, I finally decided it was time to reenter it. But still wary, I stayed away from the drink machine and went to the snack one instead. I had never had more than an on-again-off-again relationship with any of the snack products. They were never reliable enough. The selection always changes from week to week. Whenever one product, say M&Ms, is depleted it is replaced with something different, such as Reese’s Pieces. There’s no stability there. No prospect for a long term snacking relationship. But I figured that after the Welch’s thing that all I really wanted was a fling. And besides, I was thrilled to see that for the first time in months Skittles, one of my favorite candies, was a selection.

It was good at first, but then I slowly realized that something was wrong. All was not as it appeared to be. Take a look at this picture.

This Skittles package had inside it a limited edition flavor, “strawberry ice cream.” Now I ask you, where in the fruit rainbow does ice cream fit? Really. These are supposed to be fruit flavored candies, not fruit-flavored-dairy-product flavored candies. The Skittles flavors are carefully balanced to blend well together. Each Skittle has its own unique flavor, but when a handful is eaten together they blend to form a savory candy fruit cup. This ice cream debacle is a parasite on the blended fruit flavor. The cream just doesn’t mix. It stands out. It is an anathema.

Some may not think that this is such a big deal. Just pick them out if you don’t like them. Eat them separately, or not at all. Well guess what, there are only a finite number of Skittles in each bag. There are five flavors, so if one assumes an equal distribution then each individual flavor represents 20% of the total candy volume. According to the packaging the entire bag is 61.5g, so we are looking at 12.3g of wasted candy. Percentage wise, this is even a worse atrocity than the Welch’s.

You know what makes this even worse? The more perceptive of you may have even caught on from my previous paragraph. All of my math was based on a five flavor Skittle regime. “But wait a minute, there are normally five flavors and you said there was a new one. Shouldn’t you have then divided by 6 instead of five?” One would hope, but sadly no. Behold:

They didn’t just add the gay ass ice cream flavor, they replaced the normal Strawberry one! WTF?!?!? The red Skittles were arguably the finest of all Skittles. And they’re gone. So you see, I can’t just pick out the parasites and suffer a merely reduced volume. I am still deprived of all the highest quality Skittles.

I just don’t get this one. At least with Welch’s I could understand their motives. They were greedy money-grubbing bastards. But why the Skittles? They did not save any money by doing this. They still had to produce the same number, just of a spectacularly craptastic flavor instead of the normal good one. There was no tangible benefit to them for doing this. There is nothing but the sadistic pleasure in reveling in their customers’ misery.

Just when my faith in vending machines was finally healing.