When I was a child I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man...well, nothing much changed.

So in the English building, there a drink machine that is somewhat high-tech. When you put money in it and make your selection, a little ramp goes up, your drink is dispensed into it, and it slides down the ramp into the dispensing slot and there you are. That's the idea, at any rate. It often fails to function properly, however--bottles get stuck in the ramp, and if you want a drink, that is too dern bad, for you cannot have one. Anyway, the other day there were seven bottles in a jumbled heap at the bottom. This was funny, because seriously, foax, who's gonna see six bottles down there and think, well, all THOSE ones got stuck, but I'm sure things will be different this time!? But then it occurred to me that maybe some of them did it on purpose--just to make even more of a mess out of the machine. And that appealed to me. Watching a soda machine malfunction is the kind of entertainment you just can't put a price on, if you are six years old. Naturally, I had to get in on this.

I was all prepared to spend a few bucks on this, but then I came to the happy realization that when the machine does not work, it refunds your money. So: infinite opportunity! I messed up a little by not spending more time on the higher tiers first; it pretty quickly reached the point where the ramp was so jammed that it wouldn't go up at all--it would just spastically jerk a little. You better believe I would have gotten every single bottle in the machine in that pile if I could have. I did, however, add ten-ish extras to the pile--good fun for me and hopefully entertaining for anyone who passes by and sees it. Sometimes, the burden of having to pretend to be some sort of "adult" gets to be just too much to bear.