Death by Vending Machine: How my Irrational Anxiety was Born
*Trigger Warning for all of my fellow anxious souls out there. Proceed at your own discretion.*
I’ve started and stopped a few stories over the past few days, not really feeling any one of them in particular. Then I thought about this experience and figured it would be a fun tale to tell. My stomach churns just thinking about it, but maybe it will be therapeutic to finally have it written down.
I used to work at Carvana. I worked there for about two years with very good benefits and very not good pay. The days were long, and there was always some sort of fire to put out. Scheduled ten-hour days easily became fourteen. We were always understaffed. Cars had problems. I drank a lot of wine. Not at work though.
Carvana is probably best known for its car vending machines, and they’re pretty cool when they work. People get hyped when their cars comes out of that thing. I don’t blame them!
Let me briefly explain the vending machine anatomy:
There’s the tower, which houses all the cars. Each car is on a numbered pallet, and there is a huge lift which goes up and down and retrieves the pallets.
To load a car: you tell the machine which pallet you want to bring down, park the car on it, enter a stock number, and then send it back up. This is done on a little kiosk-looking thing behind the tower. When you want to bring the car back down, you select the pallet with the desired stock number and the lift will retrieve it.
When you’re loading and unloading cars, there are two sliding doors that you drive through. The tower will not operate unless those doors are shut.
When a customer comes to pick up a car, it’s known as a “full vend.” They drop a coin in the reception area, and we sneakily push a button and tell the lift to retrieve their car. When the lift comes back down, it shifts the car+pallet over to what is essentially a giant Roomba, and giant Roomba carries the car down a corridor and delivers it into one of the bays. The doors to the bay open and YAY! You have your car.
These vending machines have a lot of fancy sensors that tell things where to go. IE, it won’t let you send a car up unless it’s centered on the pallet. For all intents and purposes, it seems pretty smart.
But it’s not. And neither was I.
So, there are three pallets on the first level of the vending machines that can be accessed without telling the lift to grab the pallet. If the lift is in its base position, you can simply walk across the lift and get to the car. This probably makes no sense to anyone who has not been around a giant car vending machine, but I‘m trying.
Part of our routine was doing intakes on all of our assigned cars for the day. We would essentially do a vehicle walk-around and making sure nothing looked out of place.
It was a fateful day in April. I was supposed to be on a flight to Colorado the day after to see a love interest of mine, and I had an eerie feeling that something was going to happen that prevented me from going. Not anything catastrophic necessarily, but just something.
On that day, instead of telling the lift to grab the pallet that my customer’s car was on, which would have made me very visible to everyone around the vending machine, I just walked across the lift to get to the pallet. The car was an almost-new Tesla. Unless you were really looking, you probably couldn’t see me in there.
I started my intake, thinking nothing of it. I had the driver door open and was checking everything out. A few minutes in, I heard the vending machine doors close and the grinding noise of the lift preparing to go up. Seconds later, and inches from my face, the car door got stuck on the lift and was being dragged up.
“FUCK!” I screamed, and leapt off the pallet into the corridor where the giant Roomba was. I heard a horrible crushing noise behind me, and saw that the Tesla had been flipped on its side.
One of the other employees had gone to get a car down and hadn’t seen me in there. We made eye contact through the glass. Her mouth was wide open and she looked horrified. I walked out and told her I was ok.
I went back into the office, mortified. I told everyone what happened. There was a stunned silence, and then everyone very calmly started calling their customers. There would obviously be no vending machine pickups that day. I also had to call my customer, who was remarkably understanding for someone whose car had been nearly destroyed. We obviously voided the purchase and helped her pick another car.
Word spread fast through the company. Rumors that I had been in the car when it flipped, etc. My poor manager went out and bought a ton of black tarp-like material to cover the glass so no one could see the sideways Tesla…stuck in there like a bag of chips.
I don’t really remember what happened after that. I know at one point I went to Harbor Freight to grab some things that would later be used to hoist the Tesla out. New company-wide policies and precautions were put in place because of me. I was very glad to be on vacation for the next several days.
I so badly wish I had a picture of it. I think they told us to not take pictures, for obvious reasons. I should have called the local news, and made Carvana pay me a lot of money to keep my mouth shut. Hey, money was tight.
I lied. I just went through my photos. I have a picture. It has been three years, I think it’s safe to post it now.
A few jokes have been made about me suing. As if I could afford a lawyer. I flew to Denver the next day and that was that.
Well, not really.
If you have anxiety like I do, you should probably stop reading here.
I was reading a book called The Immortalists at the time. That was not a good book for me. It’s about four siblings who have their fortunes read and they are all told the exact day they will die. So between that evil book and my near-death experience, I became hyper aware of my own mortality. I became, for the first time in my life, incredibly conscious of every single freak way I could possibly die.
The timing of this story is funny, because I have actually felt very calm lately. But when it gets bad, I spend my days worrying about some of the following:
having enough money to retire
having enough money for a surprise medical bill
having enough money for a new car in case something happens to mine
having enough money to ever buy property
cancer, all kinds
random onset autoimmune diseases
randomly going blind
something bad happening to someone I care about
car wrecks
plane crashes
brain tumors
random head injury
paralysis
ALS
anxiety about my anxiety
getting shot
getting stabbed
random onset epilepsy
stroke
Heart attack
randomly getting poisoned
A kettlebell falling on me at the gym
Not being able to save all the dogs
Not being able to save the world
“Why worry about things you can’t control?” They say. To which I reply, “That’s exactly why I worry.”
I didn’t finish that book. I should have never started it. I put it in one of those Little Free Libraries I think. I’m very careful about what media I consume these days. Social media especially is incredibly difficult for me, since I’ll be scrolling through videos of puppies and then I’ll stumble across some random account that says “Here are five symptoms of deadly diseases you didn’t know about” or some shit. WE DO NOT NEED TO KNOW EVERYTHING. PLEASE STOP.
When you worry so much about death, you never really live. I’m fully aware of that. But I was born with a very active imagination and a brain that goes 100 miles an hour. That being said, I can’t not live my life. I’ve developed a terrible fear of flying, but I can’t not fly. I wasn’t going to miss my close friend’s wedding a few weeks ago, was I? I upped my Xanax dosage and everything was fine. Do I know I’m more likely to die in a car wreck on the way to work than on a plane? Yes. But do I like really know it? No.
The vending machine is a fun story to tell though. Who else can tell it? No one that I know. We all have weird near-misses in life-I have a few others I can save for a later day.
I wish I had some neat way to tie this up. Some words of wisdom to give. Some advice for others on how to conquer the demons of anxiety. But this is my villain origin story, and I hope you enjoyed it.
(Originally published on Medium)
When you understand the context it’s not so irrational after all.