That Poptart Didn’t Have a Chance

Well it’s been a while, but don’t fret, the content is flowing again. I’ve been up to quite a bit lately and it’s time to catch you all up to speed in the next few paragraphs. First thing is first, let’s level set everyone here. Yes, I’m sitting in an airplane (my veteran readers shouldn’t be surprised by that statement) , it’s the only time where I can sit, compose beautiful prose without interruption from anyone. Of course, if the person next to me was the least bit attractive this would be put on hold, but lets get real here.

I am in the process of changing jobs, actually just transferring from one office location to another. Same company just different account focus, and different management. I am excited, my family is just as excited. It’s a big change for us, leaving the security blanket of where I went to college, being driving distance from both my family and my wife’s family. But life is meant to be challenged and I strongly feel if you don’t challenge yourself every so often, you’ll lull yourself into a routine, boring existence which leads frustration, anxiety, and self-loathing. Besides, where we’re moving to is a hell of lot warmer than where we live now.

So anyhow, back to the matter at hand. My discussion this time around reflects on things that fail or were setup to fail and the failure itself was actually a success. Confused? Perhaps, but let me explain in detail and I’m confident that you will all find something that you can relate to in your own life. The title of this story reflects on that principle of something designed to not work properly, and just never was made to work properly and the worst part of it, no one was interested in fixing the issue.

In my previous office, the one which I just transferred out of there was a vending machine in the kitchen. Now this was no ordinary vending machine, it was demanding. It had some pretty strict requirements that you needed to meet in order to get that 4yr old brick like brownie. We all are aware of the operation of a vending machine, you put in your mix of coins or dollars bills, pick your poison and it spits it out, and the appropriate change, if any is due. This concept has been around for a long time and to my knowledge, it works pretty well. Just when you think you can’t screw up a good thing, they find a way.

This vending machine only accepted coins, and not just any coins, the exact denominations. If you wanted a cookie or candy bar it was 65 cents – 2 quarters and a dime. That’s it – if you had 2 quarters and 2 nickels, too bad – no cookie for you! So that was pretty aggravating especially when you had the munchies and the incorrect denomination. To add insult to injury, the geniuses installed a change machine next to the vending machine which would take ONLY $1 bills and spit out a mix of coins that you could parse together to use in the vending machine. We’ve taken a simple concept of put in money, pick products, get product and change into something that just doesn’t seem fair, let alone right.

Just when you thought it wouldn’t get any worse. The vending machine guy would stock it with items that either no one ate or would fall so far from the top, they would shatter into crumbs by the time it hit the hard plastic chute at the bottom. That my friends is something that is designed to fail from the start.

The success in failure you ask? Let’s dive a little deeper. I love poptarts, I eat them almost everyday at the office. A few cups of coffee and poptarts, breakfast of champions. I enjoy strawberry and blueberry poptarts, god only knows what they’re really made of, could be a recycled bookcase for all I know.

There are two flavored pop tarts in the vending machine, str=wberry and blueberry. I really like blueberry but by design I had to go with strawberry after a while because of a design flaw that no one really was interested in fixing. The blueberry poptarts were placed almost at the top row of the vending machine, so it had the longest fall – nearly 5 feet drop. If you know anything about a poptart that lives in a vending machine, you know it’s not fresh, soft or tolerable to shock. So when I would trek over and put in my exact 2 quarters and a dime and turn the little wheel and click, clank, SMASH. My poor little poptart would be in pieces. That poptart didn’t have a chance. After a few weeks of this, I even asked the vending machine guy to move the poptarts to the bottom, so they woudnt have to be dropped 5 feet into smithereens. He did move the strawberry ones, but not the blueberry ones which was strange. Does he know something I don’t about blueberry poptarts? They built more durable? Perhaps they are cooked in a sheet of crazy glue. I’ll never know. But rest assured I moved on to strawberry poptarts so at least I’d have a fighting chance to enjoy the poptart in one piece.

As silly as this sounds, I’m sure you can relate to this story with something in your day to day life that makes you wonder ‘Hmm….now why did they do that? Ruined a perfectly good concept that would be logical to most of the general public.” It also begs me to ask the folks at GM that were in the decision board room when they put up the Pontiac Aztek and said “Yes, that’s brilliant, build it!” What were they smoking? Maybe they were also eating partly destroyed poptarts.

So that whole example reflects some things in my professional life that inspired me to take the plunge and change my surroundings. Some things are setup to fail or just not work properly, even though they used to. I think the people that designed the vending machine also had a hand in designing my company’s rules of resource engagement. It’s a good idea, but someone was just thinking a little hard on the simple stuff and messed it up to the point where it used to be brain dead easy and now requires 3 stages of operation to get the same result. It resembles the exact $1 bill into the change machine which spits out 3 quarters, 2 dimes and a nickel. Sadly, the vending machine does not take nickels, so you have something you can’t really use.

It’s just not an exact fit, with confidence one would say “does not fit like a glove” when it really should.

There is no excuse for this type of situation and I feel it failure does represent a success to someone somewhere. I’m still searching for the why, why do it, why create more work. Why waste time and resources? But there are smarter more important people making those decisions at my company, at the vending machine company, and the poptart company. All I get to do is live with their results.

And you know as well as I do, when the formula is written by others and to be used by someone else – that poptart doesn’t have a chance.

Rock On.