Ice Cream Day!

It's ice cream day at the station: the folks who fill the vending machines brought in a soft-serve machine and boxes of toppings. I'm not sure what we'll do with a gallon and a half of maraschino cherries... probably the night guys will come up with a way to launch them at passing cars or something similarly productive. Ice cream machines are much simpler nowadays than they were 30 years ago when I worked at Carvel; now you just pull the lever and ice cream comes out. Back then our machines were like the dashboard of Dad's 1966 Volvo, with knobs to pull and lots of buttons to push. And if you didn't do it just right, the machine would either bind up in a fit of frozen dairy constipation or get the chocolate runs.

So the amazing thing, in light of this modern day simplicity, is that many of our people can't figure the thing out. They push the lever, they twist the lever, they flip the switch to turn the whole thing off. It reminds me of Moses, who needed only to speak to the rock for water to come forth, but he had to whack it with his stick instead. Twice. (If you're curious, the account is in Numbers 20:2-12.) For the sake of our news department, I hope the penalty for abusing the ice cream machine is not so severe. Already I have reassembled the lever and valve assembly half a dozen times.

The machine also reveals the mindset of some of our folks, who will watch as people ahead of them pump out bowls of ice cream and then get cranky when they try and ice cream stops coming out. Some people just don't grasp the idea that (1) you have to put something in, in order to get something out, and (2) there are limits to how fast things work. These are broad truths that apply to more than ice cream machines, but many people just don't get it.

Fire crews were dispatched to a transformer fire in front of Taco Bell shortly before noon today; the power here was flickering so badly that I started up the big diesel generator and we ran from that for an hour. The director for the noon news thanked me later for keeping his equipment from resetting while it was on the air, but I had to tell the truth: I just didn't want to deal with all the melting ice cream if the power went out.