Real Life Mishaps with Vanilla Coke

This article is based on two true stories based around real life experiences that I have had, both of which involved a Coca-Cola bottle of Vanilla Coke Zero. While both of these experiences were negative, I thought it would be interesting to publish an article about them, nonetheless. Enjoy! :)

Vending Machine
''Things go better with coca-cola. Things go better with coke!'' Well not always. Things haven't always gone better with coca-cola. And I recall two negative experiences that involved a bottle of Vanilla Coke Zero. The first negative experience happened in 2015 when I stuck some money in a vending machine to get a bottle of Vanilla Coke Zero. 47 years ago, The Monkees' first and only feature film Head was released in 1968, and one of the many scenes involved Micky Dolenz stranded in a desert. Eventually he came to a vending machine and put money in the machine, intending to get a bottle of coke. But the vending machine was apparently empty. Or it was broken. And Micky ended up throwing a fit.

Honestly I had no idea that I would face a similar experience for real. While I was at an aquatic centre in my home town in New Zealand, I put some money in a vending machine to get a bottle of Vanilla Coke Zero. The vending machine did get the bottle of Vanilla Coke Zero, but failed to drop the bottle. The grabber then moved away from the slot and then went to a halt.

I complained to the employees at the aquatic centre, but sadly they weren't able to do anything about it. Ironically this wasn't my first negative experience with a vending machine, but this was the first time I hadn't been able to find anyone that could do anything about it. The employees weren't responsible for the vending machines, as they weren't under the same management. So as you can probably guess, I had ended up putting money in the vending machine for nothing.

Frozen Coca-Cola Rocket
If I had believed that the experience with the vending machine was to be my only negative experience around Vanilla Coke Zero, I would have been sorely mistaken. Not even a year later in 2016, I had bought a large bottle of Vanilla Coke Zero, with the intention of freezing it. I wanted to freeze the coke because the weather was very warm. And since I like the taste of coke and I like having cold or frozen drinks on hot days, it seemed like a good idea.

This wasn't the first time that I would freeze a bottle of coke, but this was the first time the experience would not go according to plan. I stuck the bottle in the freezer, and got rather impatient because I felt that it just wouldn't freeze quickly enough. A few hours later, some of the coke did freeze. But I got impatient and decided that I had waited long enough.

I opened the freezer and took out the bottle of the partially frozen Vanilla Coke, and slowly unscrewed the lid. But as soon as the lid was only partially unstuck, the coke that hadn't been frozen shot out of the bottle like a rocket, pushing the lid off the bottle in the process. What a sticky mess. That was the last time I would ever freeze a bottle of coke without securing the bottle when unscrewing the lid.