I found four pages of my handwriting that I don't remember writing.

I remember SPO. Or, more accurately, I remember Brian and SPO. If you say “SPO” to me, he's still the person I associate with it. I remember the joke. Some of the people come back immediately: Brian, Leah, Rose, Liz.

I remember sitting on the floor outside the library during unit lunch, when 1,200-plus students were all technically having lunch at the same time and the cafeteria couldn't possibly contain us. I remember the foil bag from the lunch cart, with SPO handwritten in black marker on a tag.

What I do not remember is apparently deciding that SPO needed a website.

Not the website. I never built the website. These four handwritten pages are as far as TOHoSPO!, the Official Home of SPO!, ever got. If I'd actually built it, I'm reasonably certain I would have hand-coded the HTML. Instead, I planned the whole thing on lined notebook paper: an introduction, navigation, an origin story, “Tales from the SPO Side,” “SPOsters,” and, of course, “SPO-gans.”

I have no memory of sitting down and writing these pages.

I also have absolutely no doubt that I wrote them.

It's my handwriting, obviously. But more than that, it's my voice. The parenthetical self-corrections, the puns, the little asides that are basically proto-footnotes. And the planning. Apparently it wasn't enough to have a stupid running joke with my friends. I needed to plan a website for it.

Teenage Christine may have overstated the reach of SPO slightly. She reports “a wave of SPO-mania.” I remember a handful of teenagers with a running joke.

The basic story checks out. SPO stood for Sausage, Peppers, & Onions, one of the hot lunch options. Brian bought it. We started joking about it. The “SPO-gans” were real things we said.

I don't remember any of the alternate meanings we came up with for SPO, but trying to retrofit ridiculous meanings onto an acronym absolutely sounds like me. It still does.

I don't know what “Tales from the SPO Side” would have contained. I don't know who would have qualified as a “SPOster.” I don't remember why I thought any of this required a website.

Original TOHoSPO! Text

The actual handwritten pages, accompanied by transcription. Original spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and wording are preserved; handwritten line wrapping is normalized.

SPO!

SPO! Right about now you may be asking yourself, "What the heck is SPO?" Well, if you are wondering this, you've come to the right place...this is TOHoSPO!,-otherwise known as The Official Home of SPO!- on the web, I am Christine, your guide in this quest for knowledge of SPO, and the keeper of TOHoSPO! Here, you can learn much about SPO and the mythology surrounding it. You will also be able to read tales of many peoples' encounters with SPO. But that's not all! Follow the links below to learn more about SPO... • What the heck is SPO? • Tales from the SPO Side • SPO-gans.. • SPOsters (SPOitespeople)

What the heck is SPO?

SPO... is it an acronym for something? Yes, but it is much more than that. SPO stands for Sausage, Peppers, + Onions... it's one of the many lunch offerings our school serves us students(at the awkward time of 10:40 am). SPO isn't just a sandwich, though, it's a way of life. Well, actually, no... it's really just a topic of conversation and lots of joking around. The group of people I eat lunch with often fuss around the "SPO bag" and make jokes. One particular SPO supporter, a close friend of mine, is the only patron of SPO on the downstairs lunchline, and he is the one who inadvertently sparked a wave of SPO-mania in our group.

One day, he showed up at lunch (at our old place of eating, right next to the luke-warm pizza machine) with a bag labeled "SPO". Noone was quite sure what it was... and I, being the crazy type (not really, just a little hyper sometimes), took the bag and tried to figure out what SPO could stand for. I was (and still am) a big fan of Acrophobia, a game where you have to make up creative phrases that acronyms could possibly stand for. This was my new challenge-- to come up with the best phrase SPO could stand for... well, I haven't come up with anything truly fantastic yet.

Anyway, the next day, he again purchased SPO for lunch. This time, I took the bag and started to write slogans for SPO (I like to refer to them as SPO-gans). Soon, we all began to come up with some.

Days turned into weeks, and SPO had manage to work itself into the group's collective concious. However, discussions of SPO with outsiders left many confused, and some even considering us crazy (imagine that!). But that didn't stop us, never has, never will.

One day, I decided I was going to take it upon myself to spread the word about SPO to those uneducated in it's history. And I decided that the best way to do this would be through a website. And here we are, at that very website, TOHoSPO!

SPO-gans

SPO - it's what's for lunch.

Where's the SPO?

Got SPO?

SPO - the other fake meat

Behold the power of SPO.