Artificial Cheese

I’ve been working at National Institutes of Health for a while, and my time there is slowly drawing to a close. I’ve had a lot of good memories and made some friends, but one thing that will stick in my mind is the vending machine that had strange powers over the value of the money in my pocket. Let me start explaining with some facts:

1. The Magic Vending Machine is in a break room with a couple other vending machines.
2. The other vending machines in that room are capable of turning a dollar bill into four quarters.
3. Everything I want in The Magic Vending Machine is either 80 cents or 55 cents.
4. Exact change required.

Seems pretty typical, right? Now I’ll explain my first few experiences with this machine.

Show up at work around 9am, setup my laptop and start to work. At some point, I get hungry for a snack so I walk over to the break room to see what the vending machine has to offer. Pretzels…80 cents, Snack Mix…55 cents, Animal Crackers…80 cents. At this point I start asking people if they can break a dollar bill. After a couple rejections, a veteran of the break room told me that I could insert my bill into an adjacent machine, then hit the coin return button to receive 4 quarters.

Great! So now I have four quarters. I’m almost there; I can use three of the four quarters to add up to 80 cents so I can get my animal crackers! But now how do I get the nickel?

So for the last 4 months, I’ve been approaching random people and asking them if they are willing to trade a nickel for a quarter. The conversation usually goes something like this:

Dev: “Hey, I was wondering if you’d be willing to trade a nickel for this quarter?”
<hold up quarter>
Target: “…”
Dev: “I need some animal crackers.”
Target: “Umm.”

Generally their next statement is along the lines of “Why?” or “What’s the catch?” or “Where’s the camera?”, then I need to tell the tale of the mysterious vending machine that somehow makes nickels more valuable than quarters. Most of them just give me a nickel because I was a good sport and told them a story. Some rare few listen to the story and then explain that they don’t have a nickel. Some people offer me dimes and quarters because they don’t quite understand the predicament. But how can you blame them? This doesn’t make any sense!

What I’ve also found in the past few months that makes matters even worse is that nickels are exceedingly rare due to the way the values of coins are aligned. If you look in your coin repository right now, how does the number of nickels compare to the number of other coins? You have less, right? I thought about it and I concluded that nickels are never really useful when receiving change after purchasing something. Make a list from 1 cent through 99 cents, then think about how many cases would result in a nickel being returned as opposed to other coins. You’ll see that a nickel is only expected in about 15 cases: 5-9 cents, 15-9 cents, 55-59 cents. Everything else is a combination of quarters, dimes, and pennies.

Unfortunately there is no moral to this blog entry. Perhaps a good moral is that if a person comes to you with a seemingly unreasonable request, don’t assume that they have a nickel fetish, or that they’re building a house out of nickels.