“Make the Snickers work” was scrawled on a piece of paper posted next
to the candy machine in the lounge at work. The pain and suffering
expressed by those four simple words was palpable. Novelists spend
years of their lives trying to convey such emotion. They use thousands
of words crafted, edited, and re-written with painstaking care in order
to give the reader a sense of human longing, desire for the
unattainable, striving for perfection. Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes,
even Danielle Steele (dated reference - maybe I should make it that 50 Shades lady now), come up short compared to this anonymous author’s
reaching out to powers greater than himself to make life worth living.
Maybe I am overstating things just a bit. Dante was successful a couple
of times.
When the candy machine keeps your sixty cents and does
not dispense the chocolate confection there is a sense of loss and
frustration, and you see the struggle against the powers that be as
something fruitless, or at least candy bar-less. Your will to continue
is called into question. You are a poorer individual, at least sixty
cents poorer (Wow, sixty cents? This is an old column). The reason you forced yourself out of your chair, trudged
up two flights of stairs and poked through a fistful of loose change is
taken from you. The goal is now unreachable because all you have left
is pennies. The coin return of life just springs back into place
without the friendly clink of coins dropping into the tray for
retrieval.
The metaphor illustrated by this experience is
downright stark. The act of rising up from your chair represents the
energy exerted to pull yourself up from the simple and mundane and move
towards something greater than oneself, something of nougat sweetness.
Trudging up the stairs is emblematic of man’s continual climb towards
perfection, something akin to the Eight-Fold Path described by the
Enlightened One, also known as Buddha. (Have you seen pictures of
Buddha? It appears that dude had access to a whole bunch of candy
machines.) The loose change symbolizes the cultural and economic tokens
of achievement which are tools to an end, but should not be the goal in
and of themselves. Picking through the coins is like pulling the
greater achievements out from amongst the lesser ones, the quarters from
the pennies, so to speak. Then our “Everyman” takes those great
achievements (the coins) and uses them in trade (deposits them into the
slot and pushes button 22) in order to reach his ultimate goal (the
Snickers bar). He stands there waiting for the corkscrew shaped holder
of his heart’s desire to rotate and gently drop it a mere six inches.
Then all he needs is the energy to push aside the door and grasp what he
has been working for for his entire life. But no, the mechanism is still,
the Snickers bar does not move. The goal is visible through the
Plexiglas. It hangs there, mocking him, so close yet unattainable.
Now
some people would not do what our friend did. A person of lesser
character would grab hold of the machine and shake it in a craven
attempt to aggressively take what was being kept from him. Others might
pound on the glass protesting loudly the unfair and heartless treatment
he was receiving like those earliest humans calling out to the moon as
if it was a caring deity. The basest among us might have taken the
nearest blunt object and burst through the boundary of glass and
greedily grabbed not only the Snickers bar but also the mini chocolate
donuts, the spicy barbeque chips…all the treasures in the machine
without a single thought towards others. Others who, at this very
moment, might be sitting in their office chairs dreaming of the time
when their break will come and they can use their coins to purchase a
little slice of heaven simply known as Funyuns.
Our hero did not
care about his own achievements and dreams. He performed a selfless
act. The call to powers greater than himself (the Candy Machine Guy)
was not demanding repayment of his own lost coins. Nay, he used his
energy to make a plea that the unsympathetic machine of life be repaired
so others following in his footsteps would not suffer the ignoble pain
of such horrible loss. This person did not place himself above others.
He did not let his loss scar him and cause him to behave is a way which
was beneath him. He simply and artfully wrote the words “Make the
Snickers work” and left them for others to see. A sign of the danger
one must face whenever one places too much worth upon a single goal.
Then again maybe he just hit button number eleven, got a bag of Skittles, and went back to work.
No comments:
Post a Comment