Vending Machine Thief, Law of Large Numbers, and Me.

In any chance event, when the event happens repeatedly, the actual results will tend to be the calculated, or planned, results.

That is the law of large numbers, one of the many great principles proposed by Jacob Bernoulli 1700s.(1) Bernoulli is basically saying that any random occurrence, if repeated enough, will average out to the theoretical (calculated) value. So flipping a coin once or twice may not get the value we would expect (heads 50% of the time, tails 50% of the time), but if we did it over the course of 100, 1000, or 100 million times, it would get increasingly close to 50% on average.

According to this, I should be hitting some free stuff from a vending machine at time now…My entire life can be broken down into chapters using events where I’ve been robbed by a vending machine. Nobody has gotten jacked as often as I have. I’m not kidding — it is actually really bad.

For example, I once got jacked out of a quarter by one of those stupid, old-school bubble gum machines. A bubble gum machine! Those things are the most basic machine in the history of vending machines! You can shove a Canadian coin in there and it’ll work! CANADIAN CURRENCY! C’mon! Canada?! Do they even have an army with guns? Population the size of California and the only member of the G8 that isn’t actually a world power and one of two on the G8 that isn’t actually a Top 8 economy? Yeah, those stupid machines will take Canadian coins on accident, but my money is no good.

I’ve gotten jacked by a soda machine once that not only refused to give me a coke on my first dollar, but on my second dollar (the next week), it actually tore it in thirds and spit out two-thirds of it just to add a little salt to the wound. I would have felt better if it just kept my dollar but instead, it rips it up.

I thought things were on the upswing though. This summer, I was getting something from a vending machine and saw a bag of chips that had fallen out of the slot but not to the bottom of the machine. Despite not wanting any chips at all, I knew this was my chance to get back at all those vending machines so I ordered a second bag of chips (directly above the hanging one) and when it fell it hit the first bag and BAM! I got two bags for the price of one.

I was actually really proud of myself even though I didn’t want chips. First, I’m Asian and genetically predisposed to being unreasonably cheap. Second, I just got $1.50 for free. As life would have it, I ate both bags and ended up getting a stomach ache, but that’s beyond the point. Revenge is not painless.

Fast-forward to today. I didn’t eat breakfast and decided to grab some Pop Tarts from the vending machine. Fed it my two dollars and entered E7 and waited. And wait. Machine didn’t even make a sound. It didn’t pop out my $.50 in change. It didn’t even attempt to turn the little screw to drop my breakfast. Didn’t even make a noise. Taunting me with its silence. So not only did I get my $1.50 for the candy jacked, I even got my change jacked.

It’s not about the money. It’s only $1.50. That’s not even enough to get you on the subway in this city. Some places charge more than $1.50 just to use their bathroom. $1.50 will get you 1/11th of a cocktail in Manhattan or 1/4th of a beer during happy hour. Even the McDonald’s dollar menu here is actually the $1.50 menu. This is not about the money.

It’s about the principle of it. I’m due. I’m so overdue, the next time I walk in front of a vending machine, it should topple over and spill all of it’s contents out. Or maybe the next time I put in a dollar, it’ll spit out $50 in quarters. I don’t know what is going to happen, but I know I am definitely owed something big.

Footnotes:
  1. He also thought up the Bernoulli principle — a basic principle in fluid dynamics and one of the theories about why airplanes can fly. [↩]