THERE is a machine in this building which gives me more apoplexy than

any other. Every Sunday I stroll in to commit art on the sports front.

While you are lolling over your roast beef or even the liqueurs, I am in

the House of Horrors attempting to make sense of my notes on whatever

drivel I am purporting to report. I am hungry and no frustration can be

as blood-pressure-enhancing as The Herald sandwich vendor. Let me tell

you about this evil apparatus.

I have complained to the colleagues about it: indeed the boys and

girls come up from the Press Bar every Sunday afternoon to witness,

cheer on, applaud my uncontrollable rages over this thing. Strong men

wince and the Ladies' desk would blanch horribly if it ever thought of

turning up on a Sunday and overheard my calumnies against this object.

Many years ago I worked in a milk-bottle-washing plant. Run it was by

the socialist-minded SCWS. The machine was 60 years old and clearly

Charlie Chaplin had once worked on it and used it as a model for Modern

Times. Youse stood there waiting for the cases of empty milk bottles to

come on to the conveyor belt.

Another bit of machinery with 12 big hand-like pincers stretched out

and took the bottles on to another conveyor belt and the bottles went

through and round and about and ended up getting big steel bits putting

them into holes for the bottles and then they went through the wash and

emerged at the other end clean and healthy and then got filled up with

milk and then put into crates and then got silver foil capped upon them.

Have you got me so far?

Now the above is very boring. The below is not. For what actually

happened was that none of the operations worked. The hand-like pincers

never picked up any of the bloody bottles and if the bottles went

through to the other end the full bottles dropped on top of them, burst

like an adolescent's plook, sprayed the girls at the other end with milk

and glass fragments, and then the dairymaids came up and hit you

severely with their foreheads.

The bottles fell over on the conveyor belt and didn't go into the

considered holes and didn't get washed but slipped into the air and

added to your discomfort by exploding around you.

You felt like Old Bill in the Bairnsfather cartoons: ''If you know of

a better 'ole, go to it!'' Jacques Tati had invented the script. Hector

Nicol had done the words. The machine was designed to bring out the sort

of humanity of which we are all capable: Goebbels, Himmler, Stalin,

Souness, John B. Sommerville.

Empty space

The machine which is supposed to vend sandwiches -- corned beef,

cheese and tuna salad, various, especially various, which lies by the

door outside the newsroom has an advantage over the milk-bottle-washing

contraption: it charges money. You put in your 40 pence, press the

button, open the door, and put your hand into an empty space. This

machine cheats. This machine doesn't even do what O. Henry's Gentle

Grifters did: it leaves you with nothing at all. If it ever does the

bread has been leavened by Herod's wife around about the time of the

parting of the waters and the corned beef was corned at the start of the

American Civil War. I have been paying 90 pence a day into this behemoth

every day for months.

I have complained to the management. Devil the bit Herald supremo Liam

Kane cares: he is too busy practising his mouth organ upstairs. The

editors eat their cheese chits in The Buttery of a lunchtime. The Father

of the Chapel told me he would bring this up at the next chapel meeting.

I heard the insane laughter from his office three miles away. Health and

safety officers were no good either. They told me they didn't cover

mental health. But I am right. Correct. And truth will out. This machine

is making money for George Outram. In fact, if Outram wants to make a

real go of the business it should close this blatt and install sandwich

vendors throughout the entire country. That would suit Liam Kane with

his moothie-playing. Then there are telephones.

Public phones come in various guises but they are all designed to

steal money from you. I know not what variations there are upon the

public telephone, especially the ones in public houses, but I will tell

you this: there is no such thing as a follow-on call. I would like a wee

breakdown upon the profits made by Beattie simply on the theft of your

tenpence or more every time you embark upon a communication on their

dastardly instrument.

The boss of BT, a Mr Iain Vallance (I once had a primary teacher with

that surname: he trained at the Camp on Blood Island), has tried to make

his product entertaining by employing Maureen Lipman on telly ads. Ms

Lipman should think again. Such blatant robbery has been ascribed to her

(and mine a bit) community ever since Christians got envious of the

Chosen People. Doesn't do us any good at all.

I have now decided to take this issue to the very highest in the land.

John Smith would be proud of me. The individual comes first and

community action is required on this matter. Frustrated by the sandwich

machine and the telephone is but the tip of the iceberg. There are more

machines to topple. Some of all this is serious at that.