Free Hot Dog Day

posted at 3:23 pm
on May. 13, 2008

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I was at a friend’s house last night setting up a new Time Capsule that wasn’t being very Mac-like (i.e. setting it up was a nightmare) and she happened to mention that today was Free Hot Dog Day at her work.

It’s been a long, long time since I’ve attended a hot dog day.  I immediately flashed back to grade school, which was a very hot dog-intensive time in my life.  Hot Dog Days then, though, were rare treats where I didn’t have to bring lunch to school. I just had to remember to bring 2 dollars from home in exchange for a wonderful a hot dog and a chocolate milk in a cube-shaped box. 

Hot dogs were boiled—who does that any more?—and served on white bread with three choices of condiment: the red one, the yellow one and the green one.  It was a special occasion for me for three reasons:

* The food was hot (my lunch room didn’t get microwaves until the year I left), so other than CupO’Soup, everything was room temp.

* I didn’t have to carry a lunch box that day (Growing up, I went through several plastic ones in a short span of time. I liked to read as I walked home, and the lunch box was heavy, so I’d kick it home along icy streets until the hinges or clasps sheered off. My mom finally got me a metal lunch box like construction workers used, which was even heavier but it did weather my treatment better.)

* And of course, the third and real reason: I love hot dogs.  I used to even get them in my lunch—my mom would get them as hot as possible and put them and the boiling water into a pre-warmed thermos in hopes that they’d be at least luke warm by lunch—which to be fair, usually worked unless it was REALLY cold on my bus ride. So I’d have warmish hot dogs for lunch, then forget to bring the thermos home and the hot dog water would get really fetid and make the thermos useless for anything except more hot dogs, and the cycle would perpetuate itself.

The other place I often ate hot dogs was at Scout bottle drives, where the back of the Scout bus would be turned into a little outpost of lukewarmth with camp stoves heating water for hot chocolate packets, and coffee for the grownups, and a constant parade of hot dogs in and out of warm water.  Don’t get the hot chocolate water and the hot dog water confused, you’d regret it.

Siobhan mentioned it, and I said I’d be there, and I think she 100% totally did not think I’d actually show up, because she does not know the pull of smoked meat on my soul.

Her hot dog day brought all those memories back, and was actually moderately fun in an awkward-working-lunch way. It was down in the company warehouse, and the social committee had arranged for not just hot dogs, but:

* pepperoni sticks
* grated cheddar
* ice cream bars and popsicles
* two-bite brownies
* a Costco flat of small chip bags
* soft drinks galore
* the best part: two crock pots of chili as topping, well more than enough to make any attempt to eat the hot dog on crumbly buns an exercise in disaster, especially for the many people in business shirts (which combined unwisely with the lack of tables to eat off of)

In exchange for the free grub, I did a little spot work on the company blog.  It was a good deal for both of us.

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