Each of us, regardless of age, has accomplished Great Feats – not the ones you tell other people about or add to your resume, but the ones you remember and smile about. Maybe it was a fish you caught, or maybe it was that odd moment when your kid did something funny, or something like that.

The real Great Feats are not seen as great feats to others. They’re the ones we take out on cold nights to warm our hearts , to dry our aching souls.

I’ll share one with you.

At one place where I worked, there was a gumball machine as we exited to the outer break area. One of the older ones, the rectangular version. It took a quarter for about 5 chiclets of gum. About 5 cents a chiclet, and a single chiclet to me is unimpressive.

I decided I would get as much as I could from the machine with a quarter.

My theory has always been that every machine, every device, has it’s own individual ‘sweet spot’ that allows it to do something it wasn’t necessarily intended to. I thought it through for days. Maybe even a week, I don’t recall.

During that time I did some test ‘pulls’. Some ideas worked, some didn’t.

Afterward, I walked up to the machine at the crack of Oh Dark Thirty (I always liked working off hours), placed a quarter in it and did a twist, listening, another twist with the click, listening, until I heard the gum fall.

Then I rocked that little machine back and forth while wiggling the coin handle both ways but stopping before there was another click.

I filled an extra large cup from Dunkin Donuts with chiclets of gum. For one quarter. And it was willing to give me more. I’d taken about 1/4 of the gum in the machine.

Technically I wouldn’t consider it theft, but morally I felt a bit off that I had taken money out of this guy’s pocket (I could have just bought gum somewhere else and saved money), so I taped $20 to the bottom of the machine, hidden by a piece of cardboard. I’d beaten the machine, no sense robbing the guy.

To date, I consider that one of my great feats. What about you?

Drop it in the comments, or blog and link back here so I can read it.

I wonder what stories will come out.