Soup’s On

Well that didn’t work . My plan had been that instead of taking a sandwitch to work every day I would try to take soup to work for lunch instead. I spent some of my precious little Christmas money on a thermos and took it home and the next morning I filled it with nice hot soup and took it to work.

It may have been hot when I left for work but by 11:30am it was barely Luke warm. I thought about bringing a bowl to work tomorrow and heating it up in the microwave but that defeats the whole idea of bringing the soup in a thermos in the first place. I do not want to sit around making small talk in front of the ancient microwave while I wait for it to heat. The thermos was supposed to do that for me. You put the hot thing in the thermos and it keeps it hot! I do not want to have to bring a bowl to work everyday if the soup all ready has a roof over its head. If I wanted to just bring a can of soup to work and heat it up, I would do that. I didn’t want to do that, I wanted to heat it at home and bring it to work in the thermos and I wanted the thermos to act like a thermos and do its damn job. I don’t think asking it to keep something warm for 5 hours is asking it to do anything above and beyond it’s job description – in fact, I think that is it’s job description! Keep things warm if they are warm or cold if they are cold.. I don’t think keeping my soup above room temperature is sliding into “Other duties as required” territory either. I didn’t ask it to turn store bought chicken soup into Gammas chicken soup. I wasn’t reaching and I wasn’t passively aggressively waiting for it to fail. I just wanted warm soup.

How long are thermosi supposed to keep things hot anyway? Is asking it to keep the soup above room temperature for say, five hours too much? Would I have had a better outcome if I spent more than $9 on a thermos? And this is a Thermos brand thermos; it isn’t a shoddy store brand knock off. It came with a folding spoon and a place to put dressing or crackers! It even calls itself the fancy post-millennial “Food Jar” name instead of the old school Thermos. I had better luck years ago with my little lunch box thermos. Maybe that is what I should have been in the market for, a kids lunch kit.

The other thermosi I saw when I was looking online for them all look like discarded ordinance cases or spent ammo and they were very official looking and stainless and didn’t come with their own spoons or bowls and even more troubling than that, most of them wouldn’t even hold a full can of soup. What am I supposed to do with the other third of the can that won’t fit? collect it? auction it on Ebay? start my own left-over-soup kitchen? I mean...

And speaking of the soup. I bought Progresso because it looked thick and hearty and it said it was like 100 calories per serving but they failed to mention it had enough salt in it to raise shrimp It’s a soup! It’s a shrimp nursery! Send us $3.99 and four proofs of purchase and we’ll send you your very own baby shrimp to raise as food or pets! ( six to ten weeks for delivery, no P.O. boxes) The stuff has enough salt in it to put the Campbell’s people to shame – their soup is so salty that if you don’t feel like finishing it you can use the left over’s to cure ham! And I like salt.