Cold call.

Needing a quick pick-me-up on a particularly slow morning, I stopped by Old Faithful (the first of three vending machines to appear in WASAW's original place of work) and found a row of pop-tarts® standing before me like an old high school girlfriend who'd just moved back into town after three seasons on Baywatch.

I normally don't nuke or toast my pop-tarts, but on this morning I'd walked 20 minutes to work in the Jersey City windtunnel that is Montgomery Street. And so, for the first time since Thursday nights were spent studying for Algebra tests rather than watching NBC or drinking pints of Guinness, I flipped my pastry packaging over to read the microwave directions.

1) Remove pastry from pouch.
2) Microwave at high for 3 seconds. Allow pastry to cool briefly before handling.

I had to do a double take. Clearly I'd found a typo. "Microwave at high for 3 seconds," I read again. This just can't be. I stopped Sir Snackalot and Candyman from completing important workstuff and read them what I'd discovered. Both agreed step #2 just couldn't be right. "Typo," Candyman said without lifting his gaze from his computer screen.

Two minutes later, a Kellogg's Customer Representative was explaining the short heating time to me over the phone.

"Yes, three seconds is what we recommend," she said quite confidently. I obviously wasn't the first to bring this to her attention. "Most people tend to bring pop-tarts to work or school and those microwaves are usually conventional microwaves. Three seconds on high in a conventional microwave ensures that the filling will not get too hot." Yeah, and throwing myself into a den of lions ensures I won't get attacked by sharks.

"Three seconds for BOTH pop-tarts?" I asked her. "At the same time? That can't be."

"Yes, for both," came the response. "Put them both in the microwave together for three seconds."

She's lying, I told myself. She's not only lying, but she has all the other Customer Reps in her office listening to this phone conversation, and she's making hand gestures to let them know she has a 180-pound chump on her line and would someone please get the Polaroid because she's just about done realing him in.

Fortunately, WASAW works at a company that has a nice (I assume, conventional) microwave. So I hung up with Ms. SmartyPants and made my way to the truth.

What three seconds in the microwave will get you: two pop-tarts at room temperature. No joke. At three seconds, the microwaves, themselves, get together and decide not to enter the oven because they know it won't do a bit of good.

Five microwave seconds will warm the napkin the pop-tart sits on, and slightly raise the temperature of the filling inside the pastry so that it feels like it was passed under an aromatherapy candle at the speed you swipe your finger through a candle's flame when you're twelve years old.

For best results: WASAW has determined that anywhere between 9-12 seconds is ideal for warming up two pop-tarts in an office microwave. And for talking to Kellogg's customer reps.