edg | I hadn't exactly intended to achieve that goal quite so dramatically

More and more often I find myself growing hungry between when I leave for work and when I arrive in my office, and sometimes I head to the vending machine on the first floor to assuage that hunger. (Sometimes I have something from home; rarely, when I have a lot of extra time, I just have breakfast at home. Most of the time I just ignore the hunger; it goes away eventually.) I do my best to choose things that will be least detrimental to my health, but it's still a bad habit, and I'm trying to kick it.

Today I think I may have done exactly that, but not exactly in a way I intended. I'd noticed about two months ago that the vending machines were stocking Dole Fruit Bowls, but I'd never tried one, and today I decided that if I was going to get sugar it might as well be fructose as glucose, so I bought a Tropical Fruit bowl. (I was very entertained to discover that not only did they come with forks, but that the company had decided to indicate the length of the fork on the package - 3.5 inches - I guess so that people wouldn't be assuming that the fork's handle - handle? stem? the thing you hold - had broken off or something.) I noticed on the way back up to the office that the plastic enclosure for the fork had something on the back of it, but it looked like glue and the fork was off-center anyway, so I figured it had just been misplaced and that what I was seeing was hot-glue beads.

Brief cut to the office, where I was ready to enjoy the taste of tropical fruit. (This appears, for those who are curious, to consist mainly of pineapple and maraschino cherries.) I slid open the cardboard container that held the plastic bowl and fork, and was rewarded with a tiny cloud of dust that quickly dissipated. Sensing something amiss, I looked at the bowl before taking it out of the cardboard - and there, normally hidden by the cardboard and the fork, were two major problems:

Nearly all of the moisture was gone from the bowl. This was impossible to tell from the front/top of the container, where the fruit looked fine. But more importantly:

The fruit had sprouted dark green mold, which had burst the top of the cup at one of the edges - again, in a place impossible to see from the outside.

So instead of delicious tropical fruit, I had desiccated, moldy tropical fruit.

Gah.

I have sent email to Dole about this, and am debating leaving a sign on the vending machine, both as a warning to other customers and as a request to the vending-machine stocker to check the rest of the stock. (I'm not sure how I'd phrase it, though, which is most of why I'm debating it.) Keep in mind that I don't blame Dole for this, despite the fact that the sell-by date - December 1, 2004 - is more than two weeks in the future. I also can't blame the stocker for not noticing, since the problem is almost invisible unless you actually open the container.

Still - this is not only frustrating (now I'm going to have to rely on hard candy instead of actually getting something in my stomach) but will prevent me from going back to that vending machine, since I doubt I'll be able to separate it from the association of moldy food.