Joker Doom

I try not to get into arguments with people in the office. This is generally easy to accomplish seeing as how the place is mostly empty when I’m here, but I do have some slight crossover with second shift, and once in a great while this leads to an unpleasant encounter.

This particular encounter dealt with my apparent ignorance in the field of slot machines.

A slot machine, as I understand it, is a device which takes your money, spins a series of drums (or “slots”) upon which are printed a variety of colorful images, and then gives you more money than you put in only if the colorful images match up. For example: you put in a quarter, three watermelons line up, and you get fifty quarters in return. The images, of course, are not guaranteed to line up. You’re far more likely to get two watermelons and a badger. If you see a badger, that means the machine gets to keep your quarter.

My understanding, simplified: a slot machine is a device which takes your money and then doesn’t give it back.

The classic slot machine, which you may have seen in old-timey casinos or in cartoons, is mechanical in nature. The three drums are actual drums that spin around in the body of the machine, which is operated by a large lever along one side. Put in your coin, pull the lever, watch the drums, say something obscene about badgers. If you have an addictive personality you’ll do this with a whole roll of coins.

Modern slot machines are, of course, computerized. You may have seen them in, say, Dragon Quest games. For all intents and purposes these machines are identical to the coin-guzzlers of yesteryear, except they’re operated by buttons rather than levers, accept digital credits instead of coins, and have a viewscreen rather than a series of spinning drums.

Anyway, that’s everything I thought I knew about slot machines. But I was wrong. Dead wrong.

I arrived at the office to catch the back half of a story one of my co-workers was telling to another. My introduction to the story was: “–line up, and they stopped, and you could see them stopped. And then they went BLIPBOOPBLIPBLEEPBLIP!! and moved all around.”

I was busy checking my emails and wasn’t sure what he could possibly be talking about, but he repeated the “BLIPBOOPBLIPBLEEPBLIP!!” line a couple of times. when I peered around my cubicle partition I noticed he was punctuating this sound effect by shuffling his hands around in front of him, as though he were adjusting a sequence of knobs.

When I rolled my chair over to join the conversation he was delighted to repeat the story from the top for my benefit. He was playing a slot machine, see, and the digitized rollers came up with a jackpot. Except, at the last moment, the rollers shifted around, screwing him out of his hard-earned winnings.

“So you put your money into the slot machine, and didn’t get it back? Isn’t that how slot machines are supposed to work?”

“Man, do you even have any idea what you’re talking about? Because if you don’t, then man.”

And that’s when I learned that I didn’t really know how slot machines work.

First of all, he didn’t like the term “slot machine”. I don’t remember the term he replaced it with, but it was apparently better. And second, he didn’t like it when I compared slot machines to the $20 lotto sratch-offs that are so popular nowadays. Because those are for suckers, see. If those scratch-off players wanted to make some real money, they’d be better off playing the slot-machines-that-aren’t-called-that.

This went back and forth for a few minutes, with him trying to defend his position of having been screwed, and me trying to point out that yeah, that’s pretty much exactly how gambling works. The exchange started to wind down when he pointed out I was completely ignorant and had no idea what I was missing.

“I know what I’m not missing: however much money it takes to play the slot machine.”

You know what kind of machines I like to put money in? Vending machines. You walk up to a vending machine, and you put your dollar or whatever in, and you walk away with a candy bar. Or a bag of chips. Or a Pepsi. I realize I’ll never walk away from the vending machine with $300,000 worth of candy, but I’ll never walk away with $0 worth either.

I’m going to try and goad this guy into some more debates about gambling. The requisite mindset to continuously dump money into a game where the odds are stacked against you is fascinating enough, but what’s really fun are the twisted leaps of logic required to convince a gambler that he should keep gambling. Letting someone build a teetering house of cards for your own amusement is kind of a dick move, but you know, I’m kind of a dick.