Vending Machine Rewards You with Free Beer for Doing Absolutely Nothing – Where Do We Sign Up?

Sorry, signing up would be doing something – where do we, um, “not” sign up?

It seems no one appreciates the beauty of a good awkward silence anymore. And why would we, when the latest Minion Rush or Instagram feed or, bless your souls, food blog, is only a few taps away? Well, for starters, sometimes it scores you free beer.

In an effort to get young professionals to unplug for a few minutes after work, Amstel Bulgaria and creative agency Next-DC placed a beer vending machine in the middle of the Bulgaria’s capital city of Sofia. The only fee required? Three agonizing minutes spent doing, yep, absolutely nothing. It’s hard to tell just by the video exactly how the machine (dubbed the “Amstel Pause”) determined what “nothing” actually looked like, but at the :35 mark, one guy can be clearly seen stepping away to take a phone call and thereby sending the presumably unbearably slow timer back down to zero.

According to Creativity Online, the vending machine sat for 16 days between 4 p.m. and 9 p.m. and racked up a whopping 4,032 minutes (or 67 hours) of “rest.”

The question is, what happens if someone decides to camp there for more than three minutes? Because I, for one, happen to have zero smartphones and a pretty thick to-read list I need to hammer my way through. Your move, Pause.

H/T + PicThx Design Taxi