Ok, so I’m a guy… and I’m partaking in a great American Male pasttime: Eating out of a vending machine at work.
Nothing wrong with it. The package of M&M’s and the fritos I had yesterday was more healthy than the Bacon Ultimate Cheese Burger my Co-worker had. Granted their’s probably tasted better but I digress.
The vending machine in the Virology department is a thing of beauty. They place it next to the outside door in the breakroom. The untreated GLASS door. In TEXAS. Blazing direct sunlight on chocolate covered goodies… Chips the temperature of a deep fat fryer…
I shouldn’t have to FREEZE my motherfucking bag of fritos for 5 min so they are cold enough to eat!
What about those ever so yummy peanut butter cracker things… You know the scrummy brand x package of 12 ritz wannabe crackers with a paper thin layer of peanut butter between them. WHY ARE THOSE 55 CENTS WHEN EVERYTHING ELSE IS A MULTIPLE OF 25! Its cellophane, 12 small crackers and an almost imaginary volume of peanut butter! WHY IN THE NAME OF CHRIST’S PET GERBIL FRED ARE THESE MORE EXPENSIVE THAN THE BAG OF SUN CHIPS THAT WEIGHTS TWICE WHAT THE CRACKERS DO!
It makes less sense when they stock those minidoughnuts… A package of 8 mini doughnuts is 75 cents…
I MEAN WTF! If you’re gonna undercut the gas station in the minidoughnut department DON’T JACK UP THE PRICE OF THE PEANUT BUTTER CRACKER THINGS!
I can picture the little nazis who programn the machine… “Lets offer REALLY cheap mini doughnuts, only we’ll stock the coconut covered ones only and really fuck over the people who like the peanutbutter cracker things. Those people suck anyway!”
Cock Nazis…
So, its around 11… I work up early got to work really early and didn’t eat breakfast. I decide, I need to have some sort of sugar since I’m getting light headed and shakey. So I go in for a RootBeer and something to munch.
Unfortunatly I only have 2 dollars on me. Which means I can get 2 drinks and 2 bags of chips. (chips of any sort are 50 cents. Candy/gum/peanutbuttercreackers/cookies are all 55 cents. And doughnut/danishes/pastries the sizes of small children 75 cents) But goddamnit I want my peanutbutter crackers!
My own damn fault for forgetting some of the 85billion nickles I have in my change jar in my apt… and I don’t want to leave the labs to hit an atm to get more cash 'cause I want to leave early and avoid taking my lunch hour.
So I opt for chips. Now about 4 months ago they stocked something new in the chip section. “BLazing hot (or something like that I don’t want to get up to go check) Cheetos”
I like spicy food, and crunchy artifical cheese doodles sound good every now and then. So I figure, ok this could be a cool combination. So I punch in the code and out plops my single serving of spicy cheese doodles. And dust. Lots of dust.
Given how they only open the glass once a week, to accumilate that much dust that bag must have been sitting there for a LONG time. I begin to wonder if I have just made a mistake.
But I digress. So I have my ice cold rootbeer (the drink machine keeps the drinks REALLY cold for some reason) and my blazing hot cheese doodles. So I sit down and look for the paper…
NO FUCKING PAPER! WHO THE FUCK DIDN"T BRING THEIR PAPER INTO THE OFFICE TO SHARE WITH THEIR CO-WORKERS!
No x-word for me! No pathetically easy crypto quip 
Grrr. On good days 2 or 3 papers show up 
So I root around the magazines… Naturally everyone steals the Time and Newsweeks that people donate. So all we have are fashion magazines, 2 romance novels and an assload of 2 year old Sports Illustrated.
And some book (with pictures!) of hiddeous dental malpractice incidents.
I go for the two year old issue about the World Series and who will win it all! (But knowing the end makes the articles less interesting… Its like watching the Usual Suspects from the beginning for the first time when you’ve seen the last 15 min 5 times.) [Yes I speak from experience]
So I open the bag and look inside.
Now, those of you who have eaten cheetos before know what the look like. They look like… small pieces of knobbly shit to be honest. Thin, elongated kinda straight and all bumpy and twisty.
If they weren’t day glow orange nobody could eat them.
Blazing Hot Cheetos aren’t orange.
They are red… Dark arterial blood red.
Think: used tampon red.
Think: Bowel cancer-bloody stool red.
Think: I’m supposed to eat these red pieces of baboon shit?
Now think: Aww fuckit, its still fake cheese flavor and crunchy.
But that last thought it only half right.
So I try one, my family isn’t known for being squeemish when it comes to edible things.
Crunchy… oh so crunchy. And… Sweet?
SWEET? WTF? I want cheese flavor!!! And this isn’t spicy it tastes like TAN-
Hey cheese flavor… mmm sweet comforting fake cheese flavo… HOLY SHIZZNATS hot!
Most of the time when you get spicy from a commercial product you get “Slightly more zesty than Country Style white gravy”
This was actually kinda spicy… it was like someone took a regular cheeto and dipped it in a mixture of tang and liquid heat.
It didn’t kill me and I need food in me. So I start munching. After eating 4-5 cheetos in a row I realized that I
a) could suddenly breath through my nose
b) and in a rather rapidly increasing amount of pain in the general area of THE CHEETOS and
c) why the fuck is Opal in here?
Naturally I’ve finished off my rootbeer by this time. See, indivually the cheetos are nasty so I had to wash the taste out of my mouth, but I ran out of Rootbeer half way though. So I started to eat more at a time…trying to time it so I prolonged the fake cheese part of the taste explosion. Unfortunatly this resulted in the accumuliate of Spicons (Elemental particle of which 4.54x10^5 = one spicy unit or chili pepper in a chinese restraunt’s menu [one spicy unit will be known as the Colin] {See science!}).
I need water…
FUCK! Someone used all of the water in the current tank of the water cooler! It’s probably one of the women who work here… one of the women who can barely open the doors with the .5 inches of water pressure differencial… So I swap in a fresh 5 gallon tank of water. But this takes time, time which I don’t have.
Little did I know that there is a 4th flavor. YES a little known 4th flavor. You start with sweet, then a brief flash of cheese then a long prolonged hosing of chemical spiceyness. Then you get the finish. The finish… oh lord…
If you still remember how I described how these cheetos looked (Think: <blah>) look at the first two and combine those flavors in your mind and thats what I was experiencing in my mouth.
Boy howdie there was a party going on in my mouth, but it wasn’t the good type. It was an all out German Hard-Core S&M Scat party…
I drank 3 glasses of water which seemed to SPREAD the flavor to the rest of my mouth.
So I gave in and bought some peanut butter crackers And the taste went away.
Mmmm peanut butter crackers.
One of these days I should see what happens when I hit the Preview Post button…