Soda Machines for Geeks?

PhaseBurn writes "In all my findings, I've yet to see things like Bawls or Jolt in a soda machine. Even bottled water is hard to come by... Working in a call center for an ISP, we don't have to worry too much about what's popular with the rest of the world, and so, I'm tasked with finding a vending machine replete for geeks. While Jolt can come out of any normal soda machine that supports plastic bottles, the glass Bawls bottles woultn't fare so well. Do they make a soda machine that would work for this? What's around your office... And what's popular among the geeks today, as I want it to appeal to the vast majority of our staff?" Why use a vending machine when a community cooler would work just as well. With that aside, what kind of beverages would you like to see more of in vending machines?

Comments

Re:H2O!!!

[iankerickson]

And tea is a good middle-ground between soda and water. No jitters or stomach problems like people get with soda or coffee. Ironically, it's cheaper than either, as long as you don't buy the overpriced yuppie-oriented brands like you see in coffee shops. You're talking about bottled water, right? People drink everything but tap water because most tap water is disgusting (whether or not it's any different than what you get in a bottle). If you live where the tap water is clear, clean, and free of clorine, you're pretty lucky.

If you're addicted to caffienated soda or coffee, you can wean yourself off of it without the withdrawal symptoms (bad headache, being disoriented, mood swings) by switching to tea. Two tea bags, 1/3 cups of sugar, some lemon or lime juice (very little), and a quart of boiling water in thermos makes something as powerfull as Mountain Dew. The sugar thickens the mix to get a similar consistency to uncarbonated soda. I used to make tea so strong that it scared my co-wokers who tried it. If you learn how to do it right, there's nothing weak or bitter about good tea. I've backed off on it to a more conservative recipe, but it's something that's cheap to experiment with. It's true you can make a tea that's as bad for you as soda or coffee, but there's nothing stopping you from adjusting the strength of it over time, which you can't really do with coffee or soda.

Don't leave the tea bags in more than three to five minutes (it varies with how hot the water is and the container) or it will be too bitter. Or get an iced tea recipe off the web. Or just pour the tea (after it's brewed for 5 minutes) into a metal or glass pitcher and leave it in the fridge overnight. (Rubber or plastic pitchers leave an aftertaste in the tea). For cold tea, you can make huge batches in advance on the weekend with little extra effort (making tea is a procedure that "scales up"). Adjust the ingredients until you find a mix you like, as the proportions make a big difference in the final product.

You can save a lot of money over time this way. I think I was losing an easy $2 a day on soda. I did the math on what it costs to buy tea, lemon juice, and sugar, now that I've bought the thermos, it's less than 25 cents a day. I don't know if you can get bottled water that cheaply (because I hate the plastic taste in bottled water). I don't find tea as addictive as soda either, so it's not like you're trading one craving for another.

For your vending machine, think about making a hot water tap available for people to use, and maybe an ice machine too. That way they can make hot or cold tea at work, if they don't want to or forget to make it at home. Some places go so far as to supply the tea bags and sugar, but it doesn't sound like you can do that.

Re:Special Geek Beverages

[Wakko Warner]

I'm getting sick of every single fucking Ask Slashdot question having more replies of "Dur, this is a stoopid question!" and "What are j00, some kind of moron?" rather than an actual exchange of information.

Have you ever stopped to consider that perhaps the reason that no meaningful exchange of information occurs in this section of slashdot is because the questions being asked here of late are completely inane?

Ask slashdot used to be good. The questions used to be intriguing and required a little more thought thank simply linking to a fucking Google search. Nowadays, they're just Slashdot-Retarded, thoughtless ponderances with as much conversation potential as a pile of dogshit. "What kind of electric dork cars are there?" USE GOOGLE. "What kind of laptops have good linux driver support?" USE GOOGLE. "Where can I get good geek shit for my right hand^W^Wgirlfriend?" SHUT UP, ASK A REAL FUCKING QUESTION, AND USE GOOGLE!

It's hard to engender any sort of worthwhile conversation when the only answers you can really give are pointers to websites. There hasn't been a thought-provoking question on Ask Slashdot in months.

- A.P.