in the name of science

Yesterday was the weekly TA meeting to go over the next week's physics lab. In this case it's the thermodynamics lab, and one of the main attractions is burning a Cheeto to calculate how much energy it contains. One of the other TAs is Ukrainian and so had no idea what a Cheeto was, so I offered to go get some out of a vending machine. I also wanted to burn one to show the others how much the things go up.

So I wandered over to the business building's vending machine. I opened my wallet to find that I had spent my last $1 bills earlier that day (on a used Asimov book), and all I had was a five. I tried giving it to the machine but it wouldn't take it.

This was annoying, but I had a cunning plan. Next to the snack machine was one of Pepsi's slick new vending machines, which does take fives. So I'll use my five to get a Mt. Dew, get change back, and use that to get Cheetos. I put my five in the Pepsi machine, punched Mt. Dew, and waited for the fountain of quarters to spit out.

It gave me three Sacagaweas and a Susan B. Anthony.

I was a little stunned that anything would dispense these useless forms of currency. I tried them on the snack machine anyway, but to no avail.

So now I needed to trade one of these coins in for something more useful. There was a girl working the tech support desk in the computer lab next door so I tried her first. "Excuse me," I said, "I'm trying to get some Cheetos for a physics experiment..." and went on to explain my plight. Unfortunately, when I'd finished, the girl said the smallest thing she had was a five, which would have simply put me back at square one.

I then crashed the study lounge, where I found a guy and a girl working on something together. The girl sounded French and had no idea what currency I was in possession of. The guy was amused though, and bought the Susan B. Anthony off of me.

Now armed with a $1 bill, I returned to ground zero of this farce, the snack machine. I put it in and punched in the code for Cheetos. You should see what's coming next.

The Cheetos got stuck and wouldn't come out.

I began to despair at the prospect of obtaining another $1 bill. I didn't want to go through that again if at all possible, so I rocked the machine a little. The Cheetos did not budge at first, but slowly started to lean more and more. Finally, they yielded to gravity and fell.

Triumphant, I returned to the physics lab and set fire to one of the damned things.