Its the small victories

Last year when I still worked at UBC and was doing a lot of data entry and number crunching work, I found myself a regular visitor to the diet coke vending machine in my building. I visited that machine at least daily. Then it started taking my money and not giving me the drink, which obviously is breaking its side of the deal. I think what happened is that it was out of diet coke, but not registering that it was out of stock. So it would think it was giving me the diet coke, but in fact, wasn't.
This happened a couple of times before I chucked a tanty and called the vending machine company, Aramark Refreshments, to demand they fix the problem and refund my money.
Its not like it was a lot of money, but its the principle of the matter. No vending machine company should have machines out there that aren't holding up their side of the bargain. That's just stealing, and it leaves the caffeine dependent even more cranky than they were before (and nobody wants that!)
In total the vending machine took $3.75 of my money without issuing the caffeine. I called the company and told them. A couple of weeks later they sent me $1.25 in coins, which is clearly not good enough. I rang them again and told them had jipped me on the compensation, and they still owed me $2.50. I never got the rest of the money....
...Until today, that is!!! They had sent the money to my UBC work address, but it arrived about 3 weeks after I had finished working there and returned to Australia. Another girl I know from the same department recently moved to Melbourne also (and happens to work about 100 metres away from me here). She was sent a care package from our department at UBC, and my ex-boss included an envelope addressed to me. The care package arrived today and Melissa passed on the envelope to me. I nearly died laughing when I realised what it was, and the stupidity of receiving Canadian coins in the mail. But I laughed even more when I realised that the envelope contained $3.75, $1.25 more than I was owed. I call it the 'Careless Tax', and it serves Aramark right for depriving me of diet coke when I needed it most.
I make it a habit to let all vending machine companies know when their machines are faulty. I used to have the Coca Cola vending machine faults hotline programmed into my phone because it happened so often. They used to send me a money order and a Coca Cola pen whenever I called them to report a fault. I got my mum into it too. We have quite the Coca Cola pen collection, I can tell you.