A Comprehensive Guide to Vending Machines at MIT

A Comprehensive Guide to Vending Machines at MIT On Wednesday evening, right before the first 8.01 midterm, I had an inexplicable desire to drink soda. As in, I had to drink soda immediately or I would fail my test even harder than I was already going to fail it. I usually never drink soda, but I didn’t want to steal from my hall fridge. So naturally, I set out for the nearest and most convenient source of soda available to student-kind: the friendly neighborhood vending machine. But alas, for whatever reason, the cash only soda machine in building 66 didn’t accept my friend’s 5-dollar bill. A normal person probably would have given up there, but since I am a solidly abnormal person, I dragged my friend along with me to find another vending machine. We also had no idea where any of the vending machines at MIT were, so we wound up walking up the Infinite, down the Infinite, and back around to building 14 before we finally found another cluster. I ended up getting coffee instead of soda and also managed to pass my physics test, so that was all well and good. The point of this story, however, is that it took us twenty minutes to find a vending machine. TWENTY MINUTES. Like, that’s a long time. Also, searching on the internet did not turn out to be helpful. You can find things like bathrooms and elevators on the MIT floorplans, but vending machines are unfortunately not placed on the same tier of importance, even though they totally are. So I decided to take matters into my own hands. On Thursday night, in lieu of prepping for the Career Fair, a group of friends and I scoured the entirety of campus that lies between W20 (the Student Center) and building 68 (Koch Institute) to locate every single publicly accessible vending machine. I’m pretty sure we got all of them, but if you think we missed any, let me know! And now, nobody will ever have to struggle to find a vending machine ever again. (Special thanks to all the East Campus people who came out with me at 11 PM on a Thursday on this wild vending machine chase!)