Addiction breeds invention, at least when the necessary material is lying around at home. And which smoker doesn’t know that urge to blow up the cigarette machine on the next street corner when they’ve run out of cigarettes and are short of change. After all, this completely normal desire offers two advantages: firstly, if the detonation is successful, the object of desire tumbles out of the shattered metal box, secondly, the small change won in this way can be exchanged at an intact machine.
So it’s totally inappropriate to put people who satisfy their addictions in this way in the same criminal corner as the Beagle Boys who’ve been blasting ATMs for months. Nevertheless, the police did just that this week when they began investigations in Heimstetten and Dornach after two cigarette machines had been blown up – as if the perpetrators were serious criminals. Presumably the men and women in uniform are all non-smokers. The perpetrators, on the other hand, demonstrated the creativity that smokers are capable of thanks to nicotine: one of the two machines flew a whopping 15 meters through the air before it could finally be ejected after a probably rather rough landing. That must have been quite a bang.
But what could have prompted the perpetrators, who were still at large, to blow up a ticket machine at the Haar train station in the middle of the night just a few days later remains a mystery. Firstly, he only spits out small papers without tobacco, secondly, there are no S-Bahn trains at that time anyway. And there hasn’t been a black market for S-Bahn tickets since the MVV app was launched.
But where do the desire to make a bang and the supplies of explosives come from? Perhaps both are due to the fact that during the corona pandemic, the sale of fireworks and firecrackers was prohibited for a long time and some stocks had built up. Possibly one or the other just wants to blow something up before evil powers – like the FDP – have potential targets removed from the street scene. Chewing gum machines, for example, which due to their size could be pulverized with small amounts of explosives, have now disappeared, as have telephone booths, which admittedly required a larger arsenal. So when the ticket business is soon completely digitized, only the cigarette vending machines will actually remain. And they literally scream: Blow me up!