Consider this my complete and utter unequivocal surrender. You won, I lost. It wasn't even close, and it would be laughable for me to consider it a draw. Sometimes you just realize you were beaten badly, pwned as the kids like to say. You got me, you really got me.
It was going so well for a while. I was able to resist your siren call and walk right on by. No matter how delicious your wares, I wasn't tempted. Okay, I was tempted, but I had the perfect way of preventing myself from succumbing: I didn't carry cash. Thanks to credit and debit cards, we are becoming more and more a cashless society, meaning that sheer practicality prevented me from giving in. I can't spend what I didn't have.
And then you installed card swipes.
Game over, man. Game over. Now I have no excuse. If I want a snack or a carbonated beverage, a Coke, pop, soda, or whatever you call it, (where I'm from, we call everything Coke) I can swipe my card and fill my belly with snacks and drinks that 4 out of five dentists make PSAs about. I don't even have to worry that I'm a nickel short of whether you will take my pathetic, wrinkled dollar bill. Those days are gone. Now it's "shut up and take my money!"
This is how it all begins. Whether we're going the way of Terminator or Matrix, I have to admit that when the machines can now access out bank accounts directly, we're toast. Pack it up, we're done. Humanity's days are numbered, and the crazy survivalists were right all along.
Well played, vending machines, well played. Granted, you've still got a few years to go before you and your mechanical brethren truly achieve world domination, but you are well on your way. You know how we think, you know where to hit us where it counts, and you know how to get us to skip merrily along the path to our own destruction.
And I, for one, welcome our new vending machine overlords. There's no sense in fighting it. There will be no band of plucky outsiders who manage to evade the machines' reach and mount a guerrilla resistance. That only occurs in the movies of the 1980's, and I'm pretty sure you machines have seen them all. You're in cahoots with the Redbox machines.
So I give in, cry uncle, wave the white flag, do my impression of France. Congratulations, the planet it yours.
Cowering before your presence,
Charles B. French
More Open Letters
To George Lucas
To our Future Robot Overlords
To Coasters
To Mechanical Pencil
To Battletoads
To People who sit in their parked cars
To IMDB
To The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air
Nintendo
To our Future Robot Overlords
To Coasters
To Mechanical Pencil
To Battletoads
To People who sit in their parked cars
To IMDB
To The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air
Nintendo
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