Slurpee

So I'm going to take a short break from my usual ranting in order to tell a tale of my least favourite piece of machinary.

The Slurpee Machine!!!

You see, the slurpee machine is, as we preofessional GSA's call it, possessed by demons (this is the technical term). And not the cute ones like in Ghostbusters. These Machines are possessed by the spawn of Satan, the ultimate of ultimates, created and operated in the pure representation of Baalzebub himself.

Dr Faustus would have asked this slurpee machine for supreme powers in exchange for his soul.

To put into perspective how evil these two machines are, I shall give you but a glimpse of the inner workings of their evilness

For starters, they have a keen ability to predict the future. They have what is known as a "defrost cycle" which is used to keep the slurpee from getting to grainy. During this 10 minute cycle, the slurpee will go from the happy little soupy solid we all know and love into a very runny liquid syryp that is deprived of CO2 and is completely devoid of all the frozen goodness that is the slurpee. At the end of the cycle, it takes approximately 5 minutes to reach the desired consistency again.

This cycle will, without fail, start 3 minutes (give or take 2 minutes) prior to the arrival of a large population of slurpee consumers. I kid you not. If ytou want to know when there is a need for two people to be behind the till in order to get customers out in a timely fashion, you just have to wait until the slurpee machine beeps to tell you its going on a break and then wait a few minutes (and the amount of warning time is inversly proportionate to the temperature outside... if its 25C out, you have about 30 seconds to get ready).

The second worse part about the slurpee machine is their inane ability to tempt people.

There are little blippity buttons each of the slurpee machine nozzles. When anyone of the lights is beeping that means that there is something going on with the slurpee machine that prevents the nozzal in question from containing slurpee of the desired taste or texture. Sometimes its because the slurpees are on defrost, or they are out of syryp, or they felt like shutting off for a few minutes (for some reason they do that).

Regardless, as soon as those lights start to flash, ever person in the store has to line up for themselves to test the machine, as if they have the magic touch to bring it back to life.

There could be a crowd of 15 people standing around the slurpee machine, but I can bet you that 95% of them are gonna check to see if the slurpee machine had frozen in the 4 seconds since the last person tried it.

My final peeve about the slurpee machines is the slurpee itself. I dont know how much experience you (my readers) may have had with slurpees, but the syryp used in them is slightly more durable than the plastic coating they put on yaghts. I kid you not. Some days if you forget to wash the florr around the slurpee machine for, say, 30 minutes, the syryp becomes the super adhesive men have been searching for since the beginning of time. If you step in it, your leg is more likely to tear off your body then your shoe is to come off the floor. Worse yet, if you use the wrong kind of cleaner (Mr Clean is particularly bad for this) the chemicals react with the syrup and become a polymer, which then molecularly bonds with the floor. You no longer have tile and syrup, you now have what I affectionately like to call tilerup. Slightly more durable than diamonds, this stuff is not likely to come off the floor in this lifetime, although if I could find someway to extract this, i think it would look lovely on some sort of necklace or engagement ring...