The Lay's Challenge

So I just got back in touch with an old and good friend. Will Fyfe - better known as Fyfe Dog. I met Will Fyfe at camp back in 1998, the year we were LIT's together. I remember the moment clearly. There was all this hype about Fyfe dog coming back to camp, and I had no idea who he was. When he got there we were both excited to meet each other since we had heard so much about each other. Everyone hears a lot about everyone in the camp world, so this wasn't really exceptional, but we treated it as such, and so instantly hit it off. Will is one of the most well rounded and philosophically intelligent guys I know - and he makes me laugh my ass off. From stories of "How Will Smote the Bear at Tree Planting" to the story of how will and I don't eat Lay's chips. To brief you on the former story, Will carved a sharp pole to ward off a black bear that was frequenting a tree planting encampment he was staying at. Every night the bear would come, around supper of course, often poking his nose menacingly into tents when the inhabitants were home. The spud guns around didn't seem to be doing much any more. One night as Will was eating his dinner someone informed him that the bear was back, and that it had its nose in his tent. Will picked up his sharpened pole (spear) and yelled at the bear. When it turned around to look at him he unleashed his spear with all his might, hitting the bear directly between the eyes. The bear turned and ran into the woods never to return. I may have paraphrased or embellished parts of this story, but the part about will hitting a bear between the eyes with a pole is completely true.

Here is a story not at all embellished:

3.5 years ago, Fyfe and I sat at the cottage of my good friend Kilmer. It was a day off from camp. He was a tripper and I was a section director, which meant he was on the river most of the summer and we didn't see much of each other. We were catching up on each other's summer, downing beers, telling story after story. As Will got up to get another beer I became rapt with the back of the bag of chips I was eating. The bag was of the brand Lay's and the back of the bag, amongst the nutrition information and advertisements for other flavours and varieties of chips lay nestled a small challenge, a dare, if you will. The paragraph boasted the addictive nature of Lay's chips, and seemed to tantalizingly tease "Bet you can't eat just one!". But it did this in a frustrating way. Hostess-Frito Lay had capitalized the word BETCHA* and put an asterisk after it, as if hidden somewhere in the fine print at the bottom of the bag there was some definition or copyright of the word BETCHA. Was this really necessary? Were the executives sitting around a table saying "Yeah, I like 'betcha', it's young, it's uppity, it's cheerful and it's delightfully colloquial, like our chips. But wait. . . We can't just use a word like that, it might get stolen or misinterpreted. We need to make it our own." All these thoughts went through my head, and I was in the midst of them as Fyfe sat down in front of me, on the couch where he sat before. I showed him the bag in all its rediculousness. We became more and more outraged the more we read it. We took this to be a challenge from Lay's - the Lay's challenge if you will. The "BETCHA* Can't eat just one." Challenge. "We're so confident you'll love Lay's chips, that we'll BETCHA* can't eat just one!" Give me a break. They wrote BETCHA* like three times.

Will and I looked at each other.

We knew we had no choice. We took the Lay's Challenge. To show Lay's how rediculous, and counterproductive an advertising campaign like this could be, we decided on the only possible course of action. To bet a consumer that he or she lacks the will power to refrain from consuming the product of a company was just too good to refuse for a couple of rebels with little to no cause like Fyfe and I. We made a pact then and there: That we would never eat Lay's chips again as long as we lived. Then, knowing that as soon as we bragged of our life long pact to the others, that the first thing that would happen was that two more people would make a pact to make Will and I eat Lay's chips before the summer's end. So to protect ourselves we added a clause to our pact. The pact was not broken should we eat Lay's chips under accidental circumstances, including but not limited to being slipped the chips, or eating them absentmindedly. I thought we also included a "survival clause" whereby we were free to eat the chips in a survival situation where Lay's might improve our quality of life, ie give us the energy to get help, but apparently that was not the case. Also this included the chips only that fell under the "BETCHA* can't eat just one." advertising campaign, thus not all Hostess-Frito Lay products were banned. Fyfe and I ceremoniously each picked one more chip out of the bag, the "just one" chip the wager dared us to eat. We popped the chips in our mouths and enjoyed the last Lay's chips we would ever voluntarily put in our mouths. Those were the best chips we ever had, not because Lay's makes a good chip (they don't, the chips are as good as their advertising campaign) but because they tasted like victory.

That was 3.5 years ago, and I have not spoken to Fyfe in about 2-3 years. If there is anyone who will keep a thing like this going, it's Will Fyfe. So when I received his email address from a friend I excitedly emailed him about what he's been up to (ie visiting turkey and the middle east, living in tunisia, studying Arabic, doing 50 day canoe trips flowing into the Arctic ocean - he's the adventurous type) but not to be forgotten: had he been eating Lay's? I had to ask, and here was his reply. Will Fyfe is in Law at McGill University at the moment. It is reflected in his reply.

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Marcus,
There was no survival clause. Better starve than consciously let lays win.
That being said, I agree that there must be a clause that allows for accidental chip consumption. I am guilty of doing just that. But I think that this is justified because the point of our pact was to show that the wager that frito-lays extended to us three years ago - essentially that we could not resist eating more than one of their chips because the taste of the said chips makes them oh so desirable - was one that we could win. If they meant that we couldn't AVOID eating more than one chip because they are so damned ubiquitous, then perhaps they are right. But we were not setting out to contest the ubiquity of their chips, we both know that they were betting that we couldn't resist the temptation to eat a chip because they are good.
In this respect, we have not only shown that they are shitty chips, but also that we could easily resist the TEMPTATION to eat more than one! and that we have done so!!!!!
I am actually really happy that you brought this up. Wonderful that we have kept it up. By the by, I have a question for you: do Dorritos count as Lays? Julia has been insisting that they do (in her view I irrationally avoid lays while hyporitically enjoying Dorritos, she thinks that I am boycotting or something). My opinion is that our pact related only to potato chips sold as lays as represented in their (evidently backfiring) marketing campain and that we are not boycotting so much as enjoying the moral highground gained by winning a bet. Have you been eating dorritos? what do you think?
In solidarity,
Love,
Will

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