April 24, 2015
They fixed the vending machine in my office yesterday.
This is a big deal.
Last Friday morning, we all arrived at the Company I Am employed by, (subject to change), and found the glass on the vending machine was smashed. Most of the bottom half was in shards on the floor, and the rest was still hanging there, shattered but still clinging together by whatever little cohesion the glass particles still had. I assumed someone tried to rock the machine to get out a stuck candy and it dropped too fast, but the consensus was the someone put their fist through it, and it did sort of look like that since a lot of the cracks seemed to radiate out from a point that was now laying on the floor.
The interesting thing is that it looked like no one had taken a single thing from the pretty much open machine.
Fast forward to Monday morning and the machine was still broken and wide open, but it had been looted over the weekend. About half the rows were empty, and most of the rest were missing most of their goods.
Untouched: Mandarin orange slices.
Fast forward to Tuesday and the machine was still broken and wide open. It was even emptier, but the orange slices were still untouched.
And then yesterday, the machine was still broken but the Company had installed a camera pointed directly at the vending machine and a memo went out that some people had been fired for stealing from the open machine.
People were fired for taking trail mix out of a broken vending machine that had been left neglected for days. OK, I admit that it was wrong to take anything from the machine, but to be fired over it?
In the five days since the glass was broken, here is what did NOT happen:
-No one put cardboard, plastic, or anything over the shattered glass. (Shattered glass is, of course, a big safety hazard.)
-No one turned the vending machine to the wall to prevent theft.
And especially bad:
-No one called the vending machine company to fix it. And believe me, the guy who showed up to restock it yesterday was major league pissed about that.
So rather than call the company to fix the machine, my Company installed a camera to catch candy thieves. There is a logic there, no doubt, but it is the kind of logic that usually only makes sense to the federal government.
Mr. Blog's Tepid Ride 
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