All I wanted was a pack of gum.

What I got was a headache.

Last Friday, in between two classes, I sauntered down the hall to the vending area in Ross Hall. I had a few dollars left on my ISUCard (that new red ID), so I stuck the card into the vending machine to buy a pack of Wrigley’s Spearmint.

Imagine my horror when the red digital lettering above the debit card slot started flashing “Wait,” over and over again. Then the blue digital lettering toward the top of the panel read, “Machine Out of Order.”

“Uh, hello! My card is in that machine!” I wanted to yell. Several nearby students tried to help me by punching the “return” button at the card slot and banging on the machine with their fists. All to no avail. My little red card was stuck in the snack vendor.

Right that minute I memorized the vending office phone number listed on the machine and ran upstairs to the public phone. I was greeted with an answering machine, on which I left a breathless message, saying what had happened, which machine it was, in which building, what my home phone number was, and ending with how desperately I needed that ID.

How was I going to go to the Rec Center? What would become of the five or six bucks still left on the card? Would some stranger go around parading as “Sarah Wolf?”

That was Friday morning. I got home that afternoon and checked my own machine for a message from the vending office. Nothing. I called back, but by that time they would’ve been closed. I had an entire weekend to wait and wonder if I would get my ID back.

Come Sunday night, I was getting very, very desperate. I felt completely helpless since it was a weekend and nothing was open, but I decided to leave another message on the vending office answering machine so they would get it first thing in the morning, and then hopefully take action before too many students wanting Doritos and Butterfingers streamed into Ross Hall.

Granted, my second message was not exactly polite. But I was clear and concise about who I was, that I had called before (with a pointed reminder that no one had returned my call), and that I WANTED MY ID BACK!

I suppose this message more obviously displayed my frazzled mental state, because I got a phone call from a curt gentleman the next morning at 7:41 a.m. I could maybe overlook the fact that his call robbed me of a half-hour of precious sleep, but I refuse to ignore his advice to me about retrieving my card.

He suggested that I try to pry the card out of the slot with a “pin or paper clip,” indicating that another student, attempting to buy a Twix bar or something, might’ve already gotten my ID out of the machine using the same method.

I told him that I hardly felt comfortable messing around with an expensive, brand-new vending machine; I could see myself sizzling some circuits or mangling some sensitive wiring in my quest to get my card back, and I know that I would be responsible for repairing the damage, not the dude with the bad advice.

This also meant that no one had even tried to get my card out of the machine, despite my timely call to the vending office the previous Friday. Furious, I thanked the caller for his suggestion, and I got ready for class.

Once in Ross, I cruised downstairs to the machine where a man was restocking the snack machine. The contraption was still blinking, “Wait” and “Out of Order.” After listening to my down-and-out sob story, he very kindly offered to help. A quick flick of his pocket knife, and out my ID popped, a tad bit worse for wear.

Now that my ID is safely tucked back in my wallet, I have to wonder if this sort of thing happens all the time.

Does the vending office hand out the same strange advice to every student with a complaint?

What if that very compassionate guy hadn’t been in Ross at the same time I needed him to rescue my ID? Would my card still be jammed in that machine? At what point would the vending office have sent someone to help me?

Apparently, the fault in this situation seems to be on both sides of the fence. Tom Carver, vending director, said that I probably should have called the emergency number listed both on the snack vendor and on the vending office answering machine (294-4662).

When someone with a vending mishap calls that number, he said, a secretary answers and takes down all of the pertinent info (the student’s name, location of the machine, etc.). He or she then radios the eight workers who are in various campus locations. The one who is closest to the vending problem radios back and takes on the job.

On weekends, an answering service in downtown Ames takes calls, and these messages are checked once a day.

Carver said that most of the time, once they get to the scene, there’s not a problem anymore.

“Nine times out of 10, when someone loses a card in a machine, when we go to the machine, the card is gone and the person is gone,” he said. “They’ve figured out how to get it out or another student has gotten it out.”

He also said that a couple weeks ago, when the vending office was still working the bugs out of the machines, there were some “inhale-exhale problems.” “Inhale” refers to when the card is inserted, and “exhale” is when the card comes out.

“We had a large number of units that had trouble exhaling,” he said. However, all of those problems were fixed, he said.

He had no explanation for the strange advice I had been given. “I’m gonna have to go through my records to see who might’ve talked to you,” he told me.

He said that no one should have told me to try to pry the card out myself with a pin or paper clip.

“We don’t give that advice,” Carver said. “That’s how we get cards out. We don’t take the machine apart; we try to get the card from the outside.

“We don’t recommend people to do that, because you can do some real damage to your card.”

As far as no one answering my first message, Carver said that perhaps my call just slipped through the cracks. “I hope that’s the case,” he said. “But that shouldn’t happen. We don’t want any calls to fall through the cracks,” — like my card.