Today, I shopped hungry. I was barely past the threshold when I heard the siren call of the junk-food aisle. I had no mast upon which to be tied so did not fare as well as Odysseus. I survived, but not unscathed. My larder is full of lard. Frozen pizza, ramen noodles, nachos, cinnamon rolls in a tube.

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And frozen corn dogs.

Corn dogs. I’ve never had a corn dog. I’ve never wanted a corn dog. Corn dogs are temporary food sold at fair grounds. They are to be eaten by children, then returned as mulch after a particularly vigorous spin on the Tilt-a-Whirl. Yet, I now have a supply of corn dogs.

Some good must come of this, and I’m hungry. I shall feast upon these corn dogs and relate the experience as it happens.

The instructions say to pre-heat the oven to 200°C, then cook from frozen for 15 minutes. Well, that’s about 25 minutes in total. Duration-wise, that’s not exactly the most convenient of convenience foods. I could scratch bake a lasagne in about twice that time, so logic dictates these will be half as good as a lasagne. That bodes well.

Time’s almost up, so I peek in the oven. The smell is sort of over-used oil, abandoned deli meat warming in the sun, and the acrid sour smell of a burning plastic cup. Just like at a fair ground. So far, so good.

I take them out of the oven. They’re sizzling and bubbling on the surface. Clearly I won’t be falling short of my recommended daily allowance of saturated fat on this day. The burned plastic smell has ebbed, so I will be able to get these to my mouth without gagging.

I’ve seen people eating these on television. Fear Factor, I think. I know that you must draw alternating stripes of ketchup and mustard down the length of the dog prior to eating. Emily Post would be proud.

Ok. Not too bad. Kind of crispy on the outside. Fluffy, bordering on doughy on the inside. And a hot dog in the centre.

Edible, and only somewhat unpleasant. The ketchup and mustard are good. The over-used oil taste overwhelms the bland hot dog. It’s hot all the way to the middle, which is nice. I find a lot of “cook from frozen” convenience foods tend to be “eat when mostly not frozen”.

I cooked three, which was a mistake. They’re a bit deceptive. Each bite seems light enough, but they sit and congeal in your stomach. After two, I feel like I’ve eaten several loaves of raw bread dough. I’m not hungry any more.

There we have it. They smell odd when you’re cooking them, taste odd when you’re eating them, and feel odd once you’ve swallowed them. At the end, you are full. I would have the same review if I had cooked and eaten a boot. I won’t be needing to buy those ever again. I do have about 16 more to get through. I have a feeling there isn’t much chance of them going off, even if I stored them on a furnace vent.

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You’ve been stuck working late. On your feet all day. Even your bathroom breaks have been rushed. You’ve been wearing your crappy runners laced too tightly. You get home and finally free your feet. Your 20-for-a-dollar WalMart socks peel off like damp Bandaids leaving your skin deeply ridged. It itches like crazy, almost burns, and you finally get to scratch the top of your abused feet. Oh, yeah. Better than sex! Ok, not better than sex. Scratching your feet while having sex would be better than sex, but it still feels pretty darn good.

You’ve been fighting off the flu for days. You thought you were over it but, when you wake up, your nose is completely plugged. Not a wisp of air getting through when you try to blow. You have your morning shower. You dry off and try blowing your nose again. And it works. Completely. Your entire head feels hollow. Sort of the olfactory version of that “fresh from the dentist” feeling. Got to love that.

You pop open a new box of Tic-Tacs and toss a couple in your mouth. For that first second, before the mint really kicks in, you get that mysterious yet fleeting creamy vanilla flavour. I wish the whole Tic-Tac tasted like that.

Waking up thinking it’s almost morning only to discover you’ve still got four or five more hours to go is nice. It’s a distant second, though. The alarm goes off. It’s way too early! You just can’t handle the day. Not yet. Wait! It’s Saturday! You forgot to turn off the alarm last night. Oh, yeah. That three seconds of joy before you fall back to sleep is fantastic. But only if it’s legitimate. You can’t get that level of satisfaction trying to pull a fast one on your brain and purposefully leaving the alarm on.

Well, not to worry. Our development team has pulled out all the stops and produced another winning product. Now, Dianne, I see that look of concern on your face. Don’t worry. This doesn’t do anything either, apart from generate sales. We in development know all too well that producing something effective would be detrimental to our entire business model.

You’re all asking yourselves, “but Fred how, oh how, can you top the Hawaii Chair?!”. How indeed! Honestly, though, that particular gem did generate some amazing weight loss. The folks in our sales department were all laughing so hard they couldn’t eat for days. But seriously, who can argue that it wasn’t made of pure win? It had that all important guise of complexity that allowed us to pump up our selling price, and therefore our profit margin to record levels. Our kick-backs from chiropractic doc… doct… (oh, I almost managed to say it without laughing) con-artists was a huge cash cow in and of itself!

We are realistic, of course. Such an alignment of form and dysfunction comes along only once in a lifetime. If I even tried, you’d just tell me to sit on it and rotate. No, we aren’t going to waste our time chasing a fantasy. We’ve decided to take a completely different approach. So, if you’d all turn on your chairs and spin to face the screen, let me introduce you to our next success.

If not down the Hawaii Chair path of higher price, then what? I give you a complete 180. Oh, sorry, Bill. Face back this way. That’s not what I meant. I hardly need to tell any of you the magic price is $19.95. What if I told you that we can push the production costs down to essentially zero? That’s right! What do you get if you combine two sticks, a rubber band, and an old bike seat? I give you… 3 MINUTE LEGS™!

Amazing, is it not? But that’s not all! We’ve broken the unbreakable barrier. Remember this moment, everyone. You’ll be telling your grand kids about this day. FOURTEEN NINETY FIVE!

John? John, are you still with us? Someone get him some water and help him untangle his tie from the his chair. Better unplug that, it’s starting to burn. There you go.

Still not satisfied? What about up-sales, you ask? We’ve thought of that, too. Right this very second Mary, our top engineer, is putting the finishing touches on 3 MINUTE LEGS™ WOBBLY-KNEES. She’s managed to build a massager into the seat cover. I think that’s going to be just the thing to push the magic button. Offer that, and we won’t have to wait long for the customers to start coming.

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It’s back to work tomorrow, though. You may think I’d be ready now. A rest, respite, and now renewal. Well, as Logan will tell you, there is no renewal, no sanctuary. I’d happily continue this holiday like H. George Wells, sitting in his time machine, watching the world crumble to dust about him.

But there will be none of that. To earn these breaks one must, well, earn. So back to work I go, and the transition is never smooth for me. With time off comes sleeping in, and I consider myself something of a master. A narco-Jedi if you will. Obi Yawn Kenobi. Within days of starting a vacation, I’m going to bed at 4AM and waking up after noon. I have sense enough to use the final few days to help reverse that trend, but it still makes for a rough Monday morning. At least my commute will be across a sunless -20°C landscape. That has a way of waking you up.