There is a service plaza along I-80 that has a really cool vending machine. There is a mini-freezer stored inside the machine. You insert your money, and the lid slowly opens, the arm moves to the ice cream you selected, and hovers there. A tube drops down, and in a vaccume cleaner fashion, starts sucking at the ice cream. The ice cream treat jumps to open end of the tube and is slowly lifted and carried to the drop box and then released when the suction is turned off. And the anxious customer gets to watch all of this through the glass window with excited anticipation.
Basically, it looks like a bored engineering student was goofing around in the garage and wanted to see if he could hook up the vaccume cleaner and the freezer for lazy access to the frozen treats.
I'll admit to buying more than once ice cream just to watch it work.
written on July 27, 2002