In the late 90’s, I went to work at the Sydney Sun Java Centre, since renamed Sun ONE. Much to my delight, there were free bottles of soda in the fridge, and the management preferred we helped ourselves to it rather than take off ten minutes walking to the shops. However, I have a fairly well developed caffeine habit and I was a reluctant to drink too much of the free stuff.
I thought my problems were solved when, in a corner of the floor, I found a Coke machine advertising cans for $1.00. (That’s cheap here in Australia). So I put in my dollar, and pressed the button. The machine gave me a can of Coke and eighty cents change. “Excellent,” I thought and took my Coke and four twenty cent pieces back to my desk.
Next day, I rocked up to the Coke machine again, put in just twenty cents, pressed the button and got my can of Coke. Predrag, the chief tester, happened to be walking by.
He challenged me, “You do realise that there’s Coke for free in the kitchen fridge?”
“Oh, yes, but I prefer these cans to the bottles,” I extemporised, not wanting to own up to being embarrassed about freeloading.
He frowned, and explained, “Well, these machines are for testing on the Coca-Cola job. Those cans are months old, and they’re probably stale. You can keep that one, but please drink the Coke in the fridge in future.” I had been messing up his tests with additional vends, extra money and disappearing cans.
I slunk back to my cube to drink a stale can of test data.