From issue #132 of The Realist (Spring 1996)

p://www.discord.org/~lippard/realist.html#southern

An Interview with Terry Southern (excerpt)

We were living in Geneva once, on the 3rd floor--in one of those very modern apartments, and they had a garbage-disposal chute, and at the bottom was this fantastic Swiss mechanism...thousands of diamond-edged blades, I always imagined it...moving at the speed of light. Anyway, you could put your head in this chute and hear it down there--a soft whirring sound, and it would take anything, man--bottles, tin cans, knives, forks, spoons. I was always testing it. Nothing fazed it. Once I took a coffee-pot, put a lot of forks and spoons n it, put the pot in a paper bag so it wouldn't make too much racket when it hit, and dropped it in--you know, like "What do you make of this, Mister Swiss Machine?" Then I listened. Nothing, man. Just a slight smooth crunch and back to old soft whir.

So! Well, as it happened, I had just bought a new typewriter, and I still had the old one--Royal Portable, pre-war, sturdy stuff. So I rushed right out, bought 50 feet of clothesline, came back, tied one end to the carriage of the typewriter, and lowered it down very gently, taking care, dig, not to bump the walls on the way. That was supposed to be so the concierge or somebody wouldn't hear it, you know, something strange going down the chute--but I think it was also the idea of surprising the machine at the last minute...I must have been about half off my nut.

Anyway, when I figured it was just about right, I said, "Okay, you smug son-of-a-bitch! Dig this!" And I let the clothesline out very quickly. Well, man! I mean, I just wish I'd had a tape recorder. Christ, what sounds! Fantastic! And then it stopped--of course I immediately felt very bad. It was like I had killed it. "What a silly, kid thing to do. And bla, bla, bla." Big remorse, and then, of course, great apprehension--like: An American typewriter! They'll trace it to you! Damages! Fantastic damages--five thousand dollars! Can't pay! Prison!

But it all had a happy ending. The machine was running again the next day, and there was a little note in the lobby that read something like "Residents are requested not to overload the disposal unit."

Overload! And they say the Swiss don't have a sense of humor. Anyway, it was the smugness of the machine, Paul...I mean you can understand how a thing like that could, well, be disturbing?