Free pizza, or at least the hope of free pizza

College kids these days have lots of things we didn’t have when I was in college—computers, the web, iPods, massive credit card debt—but we had one thing they don’t: if pizza wasn’t delivered in 30 minutes or less, it was free.

On any weekend night—okay, any night really since I attended a liberal arts college and I tended to hang out with people who weren’t exactly model students (I don’t think there were any, actually)—we’d have a small quantity of money to spend on beer and pizza. If the pizza was free, that meant more money for beer.

The amount of beer you could get for the price of a pizza was significant.

It was still the Cold War then, with the possibility of nuclear war and all that. But it was not a time without hope: there was always the hope of free pizza.

Of course, eventually they figured out that pizza delivery drivers were getting into accidents too often, so they got rid of the free pizza policy.

To this day I’m still a little let down whenever I order pizza and they tell me it will be there in “about 45 minutes” or whatever. Oh, man, where’s the fun in “about 45 minutes.” And what if it comes in 50 minutes? Nothing special.

On the other hand, these days I eat Pagliacci’s instead of Domino’s. Seattle-ites, you know what I’m saying.