ANCIENT DAYS

Back when the world was young, or me at any rate, there were machines like this all over the place and they had the coldest drinks you could buy for a quarter. When the bottle top was removed, ice would form in the neck of the bottle and the first few sips were like ambrosia on hot southern days.

When I was a little older and in a much hotter clime, the two men from SUPSHIPDETNAPLES who ran my work packages through the paper-mill in Bahrain for MSO Drydocking and Intermediate Availabilities, had one of these machines in their office up on the second floor of my favorite building in Bahrain Ship Repair and Construction (BASREC). Their CocaCola machine was always full of ice cold bottles of beer and if one was in good graces with the powers (the two engineers from Naples), one could always drop in and have a cold beer for nothing. We never told anyone else that this was even a possibility. While young, we were smarter than that.