I was involved in a banana-related incident at work this week.
My plan was to get a Tracker bar from one of those vending machines with the transparent plastic carousels inside. They’re subdivided into differently sized compartments for lessees to load with tasty, additive-laced crap of assorted shapes and prices. This infernal device is called a Shopatron. I swear to God.
So I'm standing there like a gonk, holding the rotate button and scanning for my target. A chocolate chip Tracker spins by but I barely glance at it. As a health-conscious modern guy I’m limiting myself to the nuts’n’oats variety. My body is a temple. Or at the very least a grotto.
Lost in a trance, I fail to see the overripe banana in the Shopatron's lowest level. It was clearly intent on escape, having somehow manoeuvred its way to the very edge of its Perspex prison. All for naught, however, as it was now being dragged and mushed against the front pane of the machine, shredding swiftly into a bruise-coloured smear of gory potassium horror. I watched, paralysed in ghoulish fascination, as the sickly gunk continued to spew and the evacuating peel writhed like a worm on a hook, torturously expiring at five revolutions per minute.
The fact is, I hate those damned machines, and this disembowelling of the friendliest of fruits was only the latest in a series of embarrassments. I've lost track of the times I've absent-mindedly opened the door on an empty slot while the delicacy I desired gurns spitefully and inaccessibly at me from an adjoining corner of this Escheresque hall of mirrors. Sometimes I let the spring-loaded hatch slip from my trembling hands before retrieving my bounty: it slams back immediately, and of course you only get to open it once.
It's possible my issues with vending machines spring from a pathetic childhood episode in Islington Tube Station when a packet of crisps I was wrestling out of the vicelike flap-trap at the base finally exploded all over London City
We worry about robots, or CCTV, or government databases. Fair enough. But watch out for that humming machine-monster in the corner too, that’s what I say.