Common sense is in spite of, not as the result of education.

Okay, I just had to post about this.

So I'm walking past the vending machines (exactly like the one in the picture) here at work and there is an engineer trying to use a Canadian quarter. Over and over he keeps putting the quarter in, over and over the machine kept spitting it back out. He then makes a comment as I am passing, that he can't believe the vending machine won't take it.

Now I'm pretty sure that vending machines don't take these foreign coins because they don't weigh the the same as our american coins. I could be wrong, but that is what my logic tells me. I'm sure there is a way that these machines can tell the difference in weight between a nickel, dime, and quarter. Otherwise how would it know how much we are putting into the machines? I convey this to the engineer. He is a little surprised to think that the machine can tell the difference.

Then he goes to say that he's going to put the Canadian quarter inside one of the change returns for someone to think that they got more change back than they should have. I tell him, "Why don't to just mix it in with your change when you go to a store or something?" That thought never occurred to him. He literally got all happy and thanked me for the great idea.

You tell me... How is that these engineers are smart enought to design and build shit, but they can't use their brains to figure out the most common things? Here this guy went to college and got a degree and I didn't even graduated high school. To top it all off, it was probably an engineer who designed the change mechanism that go into these machines. It just amazes me.