Fifteen to 20 phone calls a day to complain about campus vending machines is normal, said Bill Young, food service director at the Memorial Union.

Frustrations about the new vending machines have been frequent, ranging from machines being unstocked to ISU cards not being returned from the machines after students used their new cash-stripe feature.

Tom Carver, vending manager, and Young said they have spent as much time as they could visiting with people in person and over the phone, trying to find out what concerns they have regarding the vending machines.

“Most people are very helpful and good at giving constructive advice,” Young said.

When the Memorial Union was awarded the contract for vending machines on campus, officials had plans to incorporate a feature into the machines to accept the cash stripes on new student ID cards. They also wanted to provide a wider variety of food.

“The university had complaints about the quality of food in the vending machines,” said Kathy Svec, the Union’s marketing coordinator.

Young said he hopes to provide seasonal fresh fruits and nicely prepared sandwiches.

He wants to provide vending customers with “an interesting variety of affordable food, and I don’t mean just cheese and crackers.”

However, before Young’s “dream” of what he could bring to ISU vending machines can be realized, he has to deal with the hardware and software problems they are having with virtually all the new machines.

“How do we put out the fire that’s burning our feet?” Young asked himself.

“The Olympics had a huge effect on our ability to do that,” Svec said.

The vending machine supplier sent ISU alternate vending machines because all of the machines the supplier had ordered were bought out by the Centennial Olympics in Atlanta. Then the electronic card readers that Debitek had made were not exact matches for the alternate machines.

There are more than 300 vending machines on campus, including 138 machines the Memorial Union stocks and drink machines stocked by Coca-Cola.

Young estimated 50 to 60 percent of vending machine problems have been hardware and software related.

One software problem is that the card readers have been taking off too much money from cash stripes. However, Carver said he is “cautiously optimistic” that software bugs will be corrected by Wednesday.

Hardware problems will take a few more weeks to fix because of the work involved.

In the mean time, Young suggested pushing the return button several times if a machine does not return an ISU card right away.

Another way to avoid jamming the vending machines, he said, is to make sure coins being used are American and are not bent, and that dollar bills are not torn or taped. Slugs, quarter-sized circles cut out of electrical panels, have also been found jamming machines.

Change problems can be addressed in the office that the building the machine is in, the post offices, the Hub or the Memorial Union business office.

For other problems, call 294-4662.

The majority of other vending machine problems are filling and positioning problems.

It’s in the Union’s best interest to work out the problems. “We’ve invested half-a-million dollars plus in this. We want to make it work,” Young said.