Snack-Shaming. It’s now a thing. How would you feel if whenever you went to your company vending machine and made a purchase the vending machine, yes, the vending machine, launched a tweet from its own Twitter account to all your co-workers that said, “Todd just bought a Snickers from the vending machine.”
Would you be angry?
Would you want to hunt said non-sentient being down for outing your snacking habits?
Would you send it an angry tweet back?
Would you say with fervor and exclamations points, “I will stop eating crap out of this vending machine for the sake of my health and privacy!”
Or would you give it the finger when you walk past it on your way to the parking lot?
Some genius U.K. fun-ruiners named Nottinghack, a Nottingham Hackerspace, which sounds like the worst movie starring Hugh Grant ever, developed on a whim, a friggin whim, the ability for employees to buy things from a vending machine using a Radio-frequency identification (RFID) card, but while they were at it also enabled the machine to tell everyone what was purchased and by whom. Devils! Bastards! Traitors!
Oh, good. Just what we all need — running commentary on our snacking by the Gods of machinery. Is it really anyone’s business your preference for Mounds over Almond Joy (which are both heinous coconut dens of evil)? We’d think not. How in the world does the technology used to alert all fellow employees of one’s weakness for Hot Fries help anyone in the Sudan? It doesn’t. Will it really help anyone decide that the shame of someone else knowing their love of peanut butter cheese crackers, or Tastycakes, or hard pretzels, or…and God Forgive Us…Chuckles candy, the burlap sack of candies, really make anyone want to throw that damn snack against a wall and get thee to a gym lest he or she be ridiculed by the likes of someone who cooks fish in the microwave or has a persistent nosewhistle you can hear ten cubicles away?! No, it probably will not!
Are these really the people you’re worried about finding out that you like Cheetos at 2pm? We think most people will say to themselves or out loud, “Goddammit I’ll eat Cheetos anytime I damn well feel like it, and no, Nosewhistle, you can’t have any, and yes, I’ll wipe up the orange fingerprint dust on the copier later, stop looking at me!”
So no. This is not enough to deter you or your co-workers from snacking — it’ll just make them decide to go all Samir Nagheenanajar on your company’s Twitter Account.
After the test group found the tweets increasingly annoying as FastCompany reports changes were made.
“The problem? No one really wanted to share their candy-buying habits. “People got angry–playfully–with the Twitter account that sends the messages,” says James Hayward, a trustee at Nottingham Hackspace. “They’d say things like ‘I thought this was our secret, why are you telling everyone I bought snacks?’” Eventually, it annoyed so many people that the group decided to shut down the tweets.”
Exactly.
Did the developers forget about the pesky privacy issue? Seriously, you start tweeting about snacks and that could open the floodgates to pandemonium. Can you imagine the hygiene and toilet habit tweets that could go out from a company account? Regardless, and incredibly, the developer still thinks it’s a good idea in an office setting — you know because Fish Cooker, Nosewhistle, and Snot Sniffler should be directly influential to your individual health and fitness goals.
In an office, things could be set up differently. “It could be absolutely be used in an organization,” he says. “You could do all sorts of things to make it more acceptable, like instead of saying a full name, say, ‘James from HR has just bought a candy bar.'”
Haha, James. That’s right. Everyone is trying to remember if you’re that James who had too much bourbon and blue cheese dressing at the Christmas party last year. Yeah, buddy. You can blame your addiction to Pepperidge Farm cookies for jogging everybody’s memory today.
But maybe, just maybe, there’s some redeeming quality to vending machines out there! So you finger-pointing, smug little snack-outing debutantes across the pond can shove your little Twitter snack-shaming experiment down the loo or some such! The Farmer’s Fridge in the Garvey Food Court in downtown Chicago is a vending machine that sells fresh kale and strawberries instead of candy among other freshly made salads and snacks packed in recyclable (mason!) jars. The kicker: After discounting salads and snacks at the end of the day, the company donates any unsold meals to a local food kitchen.
Um, yeah. You want to encourage healthier eating, you techie wizards from up there in Kings Landing Nottingham West Westeros…this could be the way to do it!
