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Sleep Deprivation and Vending Machine Trouble

March 10, 2010 By Jeff 93 Comments

A couple of nights ago I put a buck twenty-five into a soda machine at work, made my selection (Mountain Dew Severe), and the bottle changed positions a little, but didn’t fall.

“What the hell?!” I shouted, in outrage.  Then I put my shoulder down, and rammed the machine like De’Cody Fagg.

But, of course, there’s never a positive outcome to such a scenario.  Once the vending sequence is completed, successfully or otherwise, there’s no going back.  Robert Goddard, the father of modern rocketry, wrote extensively on this subject.

So, I growled like a dog, and moved to another machine.  I’d be paying $2.50 for a bottle of soda, which broiled my brisket, but I needed a cold, caffeinated beverage, dammit.

The other machine didn’t have any Mountain Dews in it, so I chose a Lipton iced tea with lemon.  And the thing dispensed a solid block of ice in the shape of a bottle.  I’m not kidding, I could’ve used that tea to defend myself, in case of attack.

“Am I on Candid Camera?” I shouted inside the break room, to people who couldn’t care if I live or die.  What was I going to do with this thing?  It was a teaberg!  Grrr…

No way was I going to pay $3.75 for a drink, this ain’t San Francisco.  So I just sighed and walked back to my desk, with an enlarged, rock-hard blunt instrument in my hand.  And I’m talking about the iced tea, just to be clear…

I sat the thing on my desk, underneath a lamp, and wondered how long it would take to thaw out.  It was roughly 3:20 pm when I purchased it, and wanted to make a note of when there was no visible ice left inside the bottle.

Anyone care to guess?

At one point I decided to remove the lid, thinking that might speed up the process.  But it was a mistake.  A column of brown ice kept inching its way upward, then melting down the sides of the bottle.  So I had a sticky mess on my hands, as well.  Call me a radical, but I’m not really a fan of gloopy, sticky workspaces.

I don’t have any prizes to give away, except bragging rights, I guess.  But tell me when you think my plastic bottle of Lipton iced tea was finally ice free.  At what time of night, after its purchase at 3:20?  Use the comments link below.

And I overslept again today.  I’m operating with a severe sleep deficit, and have bags under my eyes that’ll never go away.  Yeah, they’re permanent by now…

When I’m working I hit the sack around 3:30 am, and the alarm starts bugging the hell out of me at 9:30.  So, I get six hours on a good night.  I do get caught-up a little on the weekends, but not enough.

What about you?  Do you get much more than six hours per night? I think that’s pretty normal nowadays.  And weren’t we supposed to be living a life of leisure by now, with flying-cars and robot maids and whatnot?  Wotta rip-off!

So, please guess the melting time of my iced tea, and tell us about your sleep habits, if you wanna.  And I’ll be back with something more substantial tomorrow.

See you guys then!

Now playing in the bunker

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Filed Under: Daily

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Brittney says

    March 10, 2010 at 5:18 pm

    That’s funny, I just wrote about tea on my blog today too. You should check it out.

    Reply
  2. Not Oprah says

    March 10, 2010 at 5:43 pm

    I love frozen drinks – kinda like have a popsicle or slurpee. If you don’t like it that way you could always run it under hotwater to melt it quicker.

    10:18

    Reply
  3. t-storm says

    March 10, 2010 at 5:53 pm

    I sure hope we’re still not talking about bull semen.

    Reply
  4. Bull says

    March 10, 2010 at 6:09 pm

    I just spurted.

    Reply
  5. Tiff says

    March 10, 2010 at 6:17 pm

    If i could remember when I went to bed the night before, I could say with certainty how many hours sleep I get a night. Let’s just put it at ‘as many as humanely possible’ and leave it at that.

    11:42 pm for total meltage. SCIENCE!

    Reply
  6. Slugmama says

    March 10, 2010 at 6:30 pm

    8:44pm to cube-free tea

    Reply
  7. CitizenX says

    March 10, 2010 at 7:08 pm

    It’s a trick question. He never waited for it to melt.
    By 4:20 he was chewing his tea. $3.75 ?!

    Reply
  8. hot fuzz says

    March 10, 2010 at 7:20 pm

    It surprised the hell out of me when I made top 10 contributors – I was being rewarded for being a volume dealer. Prior to that I thought it was some sort of rating system Jeff was using for his faves – silly ass me. Mr Kay is an enabler for my exhibitionist rantings (all good managers deflect blame).

    I would have cut off the bottle half way up and hung it from the ceiling and lick lick lick like a hamster bottle ….What, they don’t encourage creativity where you work?

    Sleep wise I try to get a good 16 hours but often get only 7 supplemented by a glorious weekend nap. But I do sleep very soundly – it’s probably due to the blood rushing to my head. I sleep upside down like a bat wearing a pair of inversion boots…naked…my kids never hold sleepovers anymore.

    Reply
  9. Ed says

    March 10, 2010 at 9:04 pm

    I get about 2 hours less sleep a night than I need and it’s aging the hell out of me. I don’t go to bed when I should because I can’t stand to think that I’m spending more waking hours at work than at home.

    Bikerchick’s “My eyes feel like two pee holes in the sand” is a classic! I nominate for best line of the day.

    Reply
  10. airandee says

    March 10, 2010 at 9:40 pm

    You bought an ‘ice tea’ and you are surprised it is ice? You should only bitch if it was warm.

    I guess it took 3 hrs and 20 minutes to thaw.

    I am a terrible sleeper. I sleep for 2-3 hours and then toss and turn for the next 4-5 hours. I went to the movies this weekend (Alice in Wonderland) and my kids were mad because I was snoring during the movie.

    Reply
  11. JCIII says

    March 11, 2010 at 1:39 am

    Good Night Surf Reporters……

    Reply
  12. clintcurtis says

    March 11, 2010 at 3:51 am

    Hehehe…he’s bitching about the “possibility” of a $3.75 ice tea. Buck up, Jeff, I’m in Nome, Alaska, and I just filled my 9 mpg Dodge pickup with gas last night at the “cheap” gas station at $4.45 a gallon. Of course, it all evens out as I also went and bought a gallon of milk on sale for $6.00, which which usually costs me $7.79.
    Your tea would taken roughly 10 hours to melt back to liquid form. How do I know that…? Because I ran out of bottled water a few nights ago and had to grab a bottle out of my wife’s car that had frozen solid after several days in the car in sub zero temperatures.By the time I got off work 8 hours later, there was still a frozen shard in the middle that appreared to have a couple hours thaw time left on it.
    Of course, this could be some sorta stupid High School math story problem…Like, if a train left Chicago doing 47 mph and another train left San Francisco at 82 mph, and it was Amtrak, how many people would die in the resultant collision? Answer: It’s Amtrak…both trains would break down before they met!

    Reply
  13. Carol says

    March 11, 2010 at 4:14 am

    @clintcurtis-
    $6.00-$7.79 for a gallon of milk?!? Damn, I get upset if I have to pay more than $2.39 per gallon here in Ohio. Don’t they have cows in Alaska?

    Jeff’s iced tea melt time:11:20 pm. I take a large styrofoam cup of ice and water to bed each night and the ice is totally melted after 8 hours.

    You don’t get enough sleep, Jeff. I work nights too (usually 5 pm-1:30 am), go to bed around 7:30 am and get up at 3:30 pm, just in time for work. When you worked during the day, you didn’t go home at 5pm and go right to bed, did you? How many hours did you sleep when you were working days?

    Reply
  14. johnthebasket says

    March 11, 2010 at 6:29 am

    Yes, the ice tea…

    Well, Jeff, you kinda fupked uk the experiment by opening the damn bottle, although a brief thought of fluid dynamics might have cautioned you to open it over the sink in the break room.

    So I have multiple answers, some of them theoretical, some of them testable.

    Had you not opened the damn bottle, and if the “lamp” is flourescent, I’ll assume an environmental ambient temp of 70 (all temps farenheit), a local ambient temp of 73 at the top of the bottle and 70.5 at the bottom. Total melt time = 8.5 hours + or – 20%.

    If the lamp is 75 watts incandescent, with a closed top, I’ll assume a local ambient temp of 80 at the top of the bottle and 73 at the bottom.
    Total melt time = 6.5 hours + or – 20%.

    However, as I said, you opened the damn bottle. How much ice tea escaped? Who knows? I’m going to assume 10% escaped (and, of course all the pressure). So…

    Now you have less frozen tea to melt, but the top of the tea is farther from the lamp, and plastic is a poor conductor. It makes no intuitive sense, but the numbers I come up with are the same as for the full, pressurized bottle. I ran them twice, and it can’t be true, but it is, if all my assumptions are correct. So, here are the answers, based on my calculations:

    **********************************************************
    flourescent lamp: 11:50 PM + or – 20%
    75 watt incandescent, closed-top lamp: 9:50 PM + or – 20%

    Let’s just throw away the rest of the probability curve and say 11:50 PM for flourescent and 9:50 PM for 75 watt incandescent.
    **********************************************************
    .
    Note 1: It’s ICED TEA. No need to wait until all the damn ice is melted.

    Note 2: Running the bottle under hot water (figure 140 degrees at the water heater, 130 degrees at the tap) should melt 90% of the ice in slightly under five minutes.

    Note 3: I still don’t believe that my calculations for closed vs opened/closed turned out exactly the same. This might require some emperical testing. Could you specify the capacity of the bottle (I was assuming a 20 ounce bottle) and whether it was regular or diet?

    Last Note: So, based on my calcs, you didn’t fup uk the experiment after all. Fuckin’ amazing.

    jtb

    Reply
  15. scott says

    March 11, 2010 at 10:15 am

    10 to 12 hours a night for me and the missus. The average was 10 before the invention of the electric light. TV pushed us below 8, now it sounds like the internet is heading us for 6.

    We put the baby to bed around 8 and follow shortly. Screw Jay Leno.

    Reply
  16. t-storm says

    March 11, 2010 at 10:28 am

    carol, it’s polar bear milk. any climatologist will tell you that they are endangered and therefore rare. and any zoologist will tell you that they are mean as Sunshine especially when nursing. therefore the expense.
    simple eco-nomics.

    Reply
  17. Uncle Buzz in Wheeling says

    March 11, 2010 at 10:31 am

    You might have had a big mess taking that top off, since water expands slightly on freezing. Absent any outside forces (hair dryer, etc), I’d say that sucker was still frozen when you left.

    Since I have been working shifts for 27 years (not counting 4 years in the USAF) I don’t know what a good night’s sleep is. I get 5 hours, maybe. What’s a poor public sector employee to do?

    Then there are the most-of-the-night guitar pulls. So it goes.

    Today’s quote: “Sleep is over-rated.” (my brother Dave)

    Reply
  18. hot fuzz says

    March 11, 2010 at 11:44 am

    Did we talk about this? Should I be a little creeped out? Or should I just get over myself?

    Chef Makes Cheese From Breast Milk

    http://www.digtriad.com/news/thebuzz/story.aspx?storyid=138700&catid=259

    We were talking about the price of milk and freezing and polar bears so there is a loose (very loose) thread that connects…

    Reply
  19. Jeff says

    March 11, 2010 at 12:44 pm

    Real life is throwing another body block on my ass, and I might not be able to update until Friday morning. I’ll try to get it done later today, but just in case….

    Sorry, but everything’s getting all complicated over here.

    Reply
  20. JCIII says

    March 11, 2010 at 2:19 pm

    If there’s no update today it’s no big deal. But, we can’t be left hanging on the frozen iced tea situation.

    We. Need. To. Know.

    Reply
  21. JCIII says

    March 11, 2010 at 5:18 pm

    our Russian Further Evidence guy has been turned into a .gif > http://izismile.com/img/img3/20100311/gifko_08.gif

    Reply
  22. Not Oprah says

    March 11, 2010 at 10:48 pm

    K – If it comes to mind tomorrow, I am going to buy a couple of Ice-t’s and do some experiments. Maybe add vodka to one and then I will be oh so wiser.

    Reply
  23. t-storm says

    March 12, 2010 at 12:53 am

    better have a good freezer for the vodka

    Reply
  24. Carol says

    March 12, 2010 at 2:38 am

    @t-storm:
    “carol, it’s polar bear milk”
    Well, hell, why didn’t he say that in the first place?!?! That explains the high cost! Heh, heh …trying to imagine milking a polar bear…

    Reply
  25. Not Oprah says

    March 12, 2010 at 3:21 am

    Hey Clintcurtis + T-storm, I have lived in Nunavut, NWT and the Yukon… Currently in Squamish/Whistler (love it here for adventure)- food is not fun up there in the North – makes me appreciate what i have when i’m not there. But i seem to have a heart for the Arctic. You don’t live there for the culinary experience for sure – more for the adventure – we can eat later.

    Reply
  26. johnthebasket says

    March 12, 2010 at 4:01 am

    Not Oprah,

    Did you live in Iqaluit, or one of the “smaller” cities? That must have been quite an experience. Are you part of the First Nation, or a fisherwoman, or an adventuress? You know, I might have that last word wrong. I meant someone who seeks adventure. Of course, that wouldn’t disqualify you from being an adventuress, but that’s not what I was asking.

    jtb

    Reply
  27. johnthebasket says

    March 12, 2010 at 4:08 am

    Gretchen,

    Hope you are feeling well.

    Hey, come on and live a little. I know I’m dancing just below the bottom of the Ten Most Wanted, and I’m seeing how close I can get to the list without hitting number 10. It’s a real rush for me, but I’m at the age where thrills come pretty cheap.

    Besides, your posts are clever and cogent and I miss them. I suspect others do as well.

    jtb

    Reply
  28. Not Oprah says

    March 12, 2010 at 4:22 am

    Yo Jtb, Lived in Kugluktuk. Been to Cambridge. I’m an adventure girl. Just like to meet people. Professional acct but like to experience life. Loved the friends who I met up there. Into kayaking and snowboarding, mtn biking et al… Always love your life… Think I need to go back to school though or teach…

    Reply
  29. johnthebasket says

    March 12, 2010 at 4:54 am

    Not Oprah,

    Yo, yo. As an old guy, my advice is to go as fast as you can as long as you can; then when you can’t go fast any more, get married or go into accounting. I guess that would make it full circle for you. Not that it’s my business.

    But your life sounds good, which is more than most people in the States can say. Nice to talk with you.

    jtb

    Reply
  30. Not Oprah says

    March 12, 2010 at 5:05 am

    jtb not sure what you mean. why are you so bitter?

    Reply
  31. johnthebasket says

    March 12, 2010 at 5:18 am

    N. O.,

    I don’t feel particularly bitter. I don’t think I said anything mystical either. I suppose it’s about economics…

    When I was single (both times) I had a pretty small footprint. I could decide to move to Philadelphia for a year, then to take six months off and live on sand dollars on the Pacific coast of WA, then rent a cheap apartment in Seattle and work for a while, then move to a small cabin way the hell up Lake Chelan.

    It rarely works that way in a committed relationship. It can, but typically people live up to their incomes, so they pool their dough and buy instead of rent, and put down roots. To say nothing of the kids, which I didn’t need but most people want. Then, when one wants to pack up for two months and ski Wyoming (or BC), the other one can’t get that much time off work and we (collectively) slowly spiral into a much slower gear. Or bounce from relationship to relationship, which seems to me a better option, which is why I recommended it.

    Damn, long answer. Sorry about that.

    jtb

    Reply
  32. Not Oprah says

    March 12, 2010 at 5:33 am

    We should take this offline though. I’m sure no one else is particularly interested. I just have nothing else better to do at the moment. But live on the West Coast so can argue for a while if you wish.

    Reply
  33. johnthebasket says

    March 12, 2010 at 5:47 am

    I agree we should take it offline. And I didn’t know we were arguing. It is nice to fine somebody else up at this time of night, though.

    I probably got carried away at any rate. You sounded a little like me 30 years ago, so I offered my perspective, but, of course, the chances that you’re like me 30 years ago are lottery-type odds against.

    I always enjoy your comments so I conversed, and you noticed before I did that nobody else on this site could possibly care about this conversation.

    Have a nice night, and rent “Zero Effect” soon. Nice movie and it says what I was trying to say more cohesively. On my favorites list it’s just below “Casablanca” and “The Thin Man” and just above “The Maltese Falcon”.

    Cheers…jtb

    Reply
  34. johnthebasket says

    March 12, 2010 at 6:07 am

    Or rent “Slings and Arrows” (all three series: 18 episodes) or listen to Janis Joplin sing “Get It While You Can”. It’s all in there somewhere…

    best…jtb

    Reply
  35. Sponge says

    March 12, 2010 at 8:39 am

    6 pm is my guess

    Reply
  36. t-storm says

    March 12, 2010 at 10:38 am

    jtb
    just read your posts. i want to subscribe to your newsletter. i’m currently the single guy bouncin’ town to town, up and down the dial (i’m livin’ on the air in cincinnati). but am currently dating a girl at the tail end of a failed marriage with a 2 yr old being told that if this is who i am then it won’t work, etc. of course the apology comes a day later but not after thinking that you’ve failed again.

    sorry, went a little too far there. i’m currently drinking at the st. louis airport on my way to louisville for the funeral of the best grandma ever.

    Reply
  37. johnthebasket says

    March 12, 2010 at 11:12 am

    t –

    My condolences. I lost my grandparents long ago and still miss them. My Dad died last May at 92 and, although he had a long and good life, I miss him every day. So my thoughts will be with you.

    A guy with a chaotic life like mine probably shouldn’t be publishing a newsletter about relationships. It would be like Richard Nixon advising people on how to tell the truth.

    Again, sorry to hear about your grandmother.

    best wishes…

    jtb

    Reply
  38. t-storm says

    March 12, 2010 at 11:40 am

    jtb,
    thanks. i’ll miss her, but i’ll miss the woman i knew and how i knew her. climbing to the top of iroquois park in louisville. i’m glad she died before they took her legs. she would have died anyway. the woman would make hilary look like a housewife.

    i don’t know. maybe your advice could guide people. either way.

    Robot lords of tokyo!

    Reply
  39. Lee Harvey Ramone says

    March 12, 2010 at 11:51 am

    I’m a street-walking cheetah with a heart full of napalm

    A couple of alka seltzers oughta fix that, though….

    Reply
  40. Lee Harvey Ramone says

    March 12, 2010 at 11:52 am

    back in the top-ten!

    Reply
  41. t-storm says

    March 12, 2010 at 11:59 am

    and if i had money, like henry ford. lord i’d have a woman on ev’ry road

    Reply
  42. Misselle says

    March 12, 2010 at 11:32 pm

    I lay down for about 9 which results in maybe 5 solid hours of sleep. I am a light sleeper and I am also rounding the bend to my third trimester with a huge sinus infection to top it all off. That is a recipe for one cranky bitch in the morning!

    The problem, aside from the fact that I am unable to breathe through my nostrils, is that I sleep on my stomach and the future linebacker I am incubating will have none of it. In fact, if I try to roll over in my sleep he sticks out an appendage like a kickstand, thus preventing me from rolling over. Can’t blame the kid there – clever solution.

    Reply
  43. Bruce "the Mid-Life Mentor" says

    March 13, 2010 at 11:50 am

    I am guessing about 4 hours or 720PM,

    6 hours is what I get most of the time. I think it is adequate for me as I do not get tired, my mind is clear and I don’t need a caffeine boost to sustain me. I sounds like you need more. You might want to try a couple of tablespoons of MCT oil daily or some coconut oil (vigrin only) as these can really give your brain the energy boost it needs.

    By-the-way the best post I have ever written never got the response one like this has. Bravo to you, my hat is off and I am on one bended knee.

    Reply
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