Wednesday, June 23, 2004
Bit-O-Reality
You don’t know why, but you stand at your desk; your body has done it before your mind questions itself into inactivity. Now that you’re standing, you begin to walk. Where? You haven’t a clue but you suddenly know that you have to leave the cubefarm for a minute or two. The bathroom? Not now, thanks. Outside? Too nice a day, too much work at the desk - don’t have time to enjoy it. At the elevator bank, you press “up” instead of “down.”
So, what’s up? Select the top floor of the building, the only floor where anything is even conceiveably going on. Arriving, the silence is all-encompassing; the low buzz of overhead lights and the soft whoosh of air in the lift shafts only accentuates the lack of other sounds or activity. At this point there is only one place to go - the lunchroom, with its panoramic view across the bay. Just inside the lunchroom door is a vending machine - last refuge of the culinary scoundrel. You stand in front of it, almost without understanding, gazing at the panoply of options. Chips. Crackers. Rice Krispy (tm) treats. Chocolate. Mints. Soup-in-a-cup. You can’t imagine eating any of it; it all looks like it would turn to mulch in your mouth.
Mulch mouth. Images of Fat Albert and zombies crawling out of graves only further deadens your appetite for any of the options before you, and you query your reflection in the glass front of the vending machine, what am I doing here? Why did I even leave my desk? But you realize you’ve been standing in front of the vending machine for five minutes and other people in the room have noticed; you don’t feel comfortable just not getting anything, for no good reason you can imagine. It irritates you that you are here, that you feel compelled to get something you don’t really want, that you are inflicting the pressure on yourself to spend money on bad food or a bad substitute for food.
Wait a second. The red wrapper attracts your attention - how long since you had a Bit-O-Honey? They used to have tv ads, but it’s been forever since you’ve even thought of them. Just sweetness, almost no flavor. Good jaw exerciser. Low tech. Low price. Lo and behold, you’re feeding a crisp georgie into the machine and hit the battleship-game coordinates for a little candy you didn’t even realize you wanted. The helix spins and you hear the stiff toffee bar fall to the metal floor - twice.
Twice? You push your hand through the metal flap protecting the product retrieval compartment and find two - two! - bit-o-honeys lying next to each other. One for now, and one for later. You pocket them so no one who runs into you thinks you’re a glutton who’s eating two weird old-skool candy bars at once, and you retreat again to your desk - finally realizing why you got up in the first place.
