Cluck U’s 911 challenge.

They used to have a waiver you’d sign where the first point declared “I’m an idiot”.

Now they don’t need you to sign a waiver.

You still need to eat 12 ridiculously hot wings in 10 minutes. No napkins.  No drinks. Nothing else to eat.  For 5 minutes before the challenge and 5 minutes after you finish your wings.  You need to lick your fingers clean. You need to eat the chicken off the bone instead of pulling it off and eating a pile of chicken.

You can win a t-shirt.  And a photo up on the wall.

A few guys at work were down for the challenge.

I bought 4 orders.  One for myself, one for Sean, one for Joe and one for Alex.

The place even spends a dollar to play “Eye of the Tiger” on the jukebox when the clock starts.  I tapped out within 10 seconds.  I had actually tasted some of the sauce (there was lots of sauce in the thing…more sauce than chicken I think) as it rubbed on my hand while getting my wings.  It didn’t seem that bad.  Then I spent 45 seconds listening to the review of the rules and my throat started to burn.

I’m too old for this stuff.  Didn’t seem like my body was up for a full wing of sauce.  And I have kettlebell class on Wednesday nights.

However, Sean, Joe and Alex are not old and feeble like me. They dug in.  Initially it’s easy.  After I tapped out, Chuck had a wing and said that Firehouse’s wings are hotter.  So EJ took one too.  I disagreed with them, not that Firehouse ain’t hot…but that they hadn’t let the Cluck U wings settle.  Chuck agrees now.  He had 2 of the 911 wings…and said that they must be hotter than the Firehouse ones, cause he could eat more than 2 Firehouse wings.

EJ made some strange noises and devoured the sour cream off my nachos.

Alex made it through 4 or 5.  Joe I think to 6.  Sean at 7 said he would vomit if he ate more.  We convinced him it wasn’t worth it.  Stop eating.  Kelly bought ice cream bars that were appreciated all around.  Several 32 ounce sodas were consumed.  People even brushed their teeth.

Still, it looked like we’d have a couple of WFH messages later on in the day.

In fact, I was in a meeting when the status of Sean was brought up.  People were saying I was responsible for his condition.  (He was not very available but if you really wanted to find him, all you had to do was follow the groaning.)  I tried to play innocent – I didn’t force any chicken wings into anyone’s mouth.  I didn’t bring up the 911 challenge even.  I felt I was on pretty good ground. But their counterpoint was pretty persuasive…

If you weren’t around, no one would have eaten any of the wings.  Sure, we would have talked about it at lunch one day, but then we would have walked upstairs, gone back to work and forgot about it.  You made it happen.

I might be an enabler.  No one complains when it’s paintball or go-kart racing or Vegas offsites or hack days.  But when someone gets ravaged by 7 chicken wings to the extent where I’m told to get on webmd and search for spicy food poisoning to see if they have suggestions for what we can do, all of a sudden I’m the devil?  Fair enough.  They were pretty horrible.

At the same time, it also seemed like a waste to throw them away.

I wanted to take Kari up on her theory that people at work will eat any free food.  She had seen a cake with a sign saying that “it wasn’t very good” next to it so I thought maybe these wings could find a home in our office common area.  Now, a cake that is just “good” and not “very good” is still definitely many, many, many levels more appealing than a lump of hot sauce with bones in it and a sign that says “hot wings” (people did give me credit for underlining “hot” 3 times) but I thought maybe someone would be daring enough.

First time I went back to check, no one had taken the bait.

Second time I went back, they were in the trash.

Ben has an intro video and a comment that pretty much sums things up too.  (I wasn’t expecting the runny noses.  Makes sense in hindsight…just not something I was thinking about going into it…)

His other comment, made at the venue was “I don’t want those things in my body”.

All in all, I wish a speedy recovery to all those involved and am looking forward to our next adventure.