Soda vending in the snow

The soda vending business is down this year. We are having a lot of cold weather. I cannot believe how much snow we have had. It was supposed to snow today, but it seems to be staying to the south.

It has been so cold that I haven't gotten to do any of my vending machine maintenance yet. It has to be above 40 degrees before I can touch up the paint on the cages and other things.

The kids have been learning to stay quite and sit in the van. Many of the locations that I have I can pull right next to the soda machine. I have decided to leave the four kids in the van while I fill the machines because it has been so cold. They do not complain at all. My children to not like being cold. They have been helping me more at home counting the money and things like that.

Isn't there a famous saying somewhere "This too will pass."

I finally figured out what was wrong with the machine that would not vend properly. The cradle (actually it is called a rotor) got bent last September when a can jammed in it. It had been bent a previous time and we had just straightened it out. I decided to replace the cradle to keep it from jamming the whole machine. We got a cradle that looked like the old one, but when we installed it, it would vend one can, two cans and zero cans, instead of one can each time. I thought it was the motor, but the motor was fine. I tried everything I could think of, including bending the stops on the motor's brakes. It didn't work. Finally, the other day, I had a chance to go without any of the kids. I emptied the row right next to the broken row. When I did that, I realized that the cradle was just slightly different than the other ones. It would never work. It would always overshoot on two of the vends and drop the wrong number of cans. I decided to set that column to 2 cans deep instead of 3 cans deep. Then I changed the selection to Diet Pepsi because the office people requested a diet soda. So now all of the columns are vending and I didn't have to purchase a new cradle. I am so happy that I got that machine fixed.