Midnight run for cupcakes

I was contemplating the fact that we would likely have to move to New York, given the recent opening of an ATM there that dispenses cupcakes 24 hours a day, when I read that DC, too, is slated to get such a machine. Whew! That was a close call. MUCH better to just drive 30 or 40 minutes in the middle of the night when the cupcake urge hits.

Or when your child informs you that he needs 31 cupcakes by morning or his classmates will never forgive him, and he will be ostracized for life, and need expensive therapy, and it will be all your fault, and he will continue to live with you the rest of his adult life because he cannot hold down a job, and he will eat cupcakes all day in an attempt to wipe away the shame of not providing them for his first grade class.

But happily, all this can be avoided as long as you live near a cupcake ATM. You can just get in your car -- or walk, if you live close by -- and pull the lever, hoping that at least 30 of the 760 cupcakes the machine is stocked with* are still inside. Of course you would be paying premium for these creations, but what is that to a parent whose only other emergency option is carrot sticks, and who faces a lifetime of therapy bills?

Probably many parents have ingredients on hand for such emergencies, but in our household cupcake-making things are not usually just lying around waiting to be fashioned into yumminess. If they were, I would make cupcakes for no reason at all, and we would eat them, and that would be bad.

Reaction to the new cupcake ATM has been positive, with people lined up to try it even during hours the cupcake store is also open. Maybe they just need to assure themselves that it would be worth coming back for at 3 am.

But not everyone is enamored of the new machine. While many individuals think it is "so cool," and that "sometimes you just, you know, need a cupcake at 3 a.m.," others are of the opinion that "It's stupid. No one needs a cupcake at 3 a.m."

Sounds to me like SOMEONE could use a cupcake or two -- no matter what time of day it is.

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*This is how many cupcakes are in the New York machine. You other cities, sorry, you have to duke it out for fewer cupcakes.