Cafeteria Lines
It starts out innocently enough. After thinking for four hours straight, the students storm the dining hall. We beat each other, slam doors in each others faces, toss backpacks on the ground in a competitor's path in the hopes that they will get caught on a strap and fall, all in an effort to get to the line. This, of course, is all a gross exaggeration. There is only minor jostling as we jockey for a position in the line. I, as a senior, am a seasoned veteran, and usually emerge on top. We stand in line, grabbing the trays as we approach the hot line.
The soup pot begins the line, next to it a list of today's fine dining. The food is hot, tantalizingly steaming up the glass sneezeguard above it. I shift from foot to foot, anxious to plop as much as possible onto my plate. And suddenly, the line stops. I wait. Five seconds pass, then six, then twenty. Everyone cranes their necks to look down the line. And there is the culprit, looking conflictedly between rice pilaf and roasted beets. Under the strain, he is breaking into a sweat, looking between the items with ever increasing frequency. Now, if life worked as it should, a pack of ravening wolverines trained only for this purpose would run over, eat him, and clear away his tray. The line would then continue as normal.
As the world we live in is an unjust one, however, we are forced to wait for the kid to not only decide between to options, but also figure out how to use a spoon and then use it to scoop food onto his plate. It is a daily problem, perhaps due to short term memory loss, and one I must endure every time I try to eat. Few people seem to understand the incredible urgency required in obtaining food in the dining hall. Twenty seconds can make a lot of difference when there are thirty people in line. I make it a point to know what I want when I get there and move efficiently.
The second most common wrench in the finely tuned machine of food-getting is when someone decides he really needs half of the french fries available on the line, and fills his tray with them; his compatriot takes care of the second half. Actually, french fries are at the end of the line. The true problem is when people pick something in the middle of the line, like fried chicken, and then everyone is forced to wait for the next batch to come up. Communication is minimal in dining hall, occluded by our desperate desire to eat, so even if you don't want to eat fried chicken and are really interested in something farther down the line, you still end up waiting for the fried chicken to come before you can get what you want. And by the time you get there, that's run out, too. Meanwhile, the line is growing shorter because students in the back have resorted to cannibalism, or the salad bar.
There's no quick lane in dining hall like there is in the supermarket, so move faster. I'm not saying that you have to, but I am saying that I've got some cages in my back yard that are just about the right size for wolverines...
The soup pot begins the line, next to it a list of today's fine dining. The food is hot, tantalizingly steaming up the glass sneezeguard above it. I shift from foot to foot, anxious to plop as much as possible onto my plate. And suddenly, the line stops. I wait. Five seconds pass, then six, then twenty. Everyone cranes their necks to look down the line. And there is the culprit, looking conflictedly between rice pilaf and roasted beets. Under the strain, he is breaking into a sweat, looking between the items with ever increasing frequency. Now, if life worked as it should, a pack of ravening wolverines trained only for this purpose would run over, eat him, and clear away his tray. The line would then continue as normal.
As the world we live in is an unjust one, however, we are forced to wait for the kid to not only decide between to options, but also figure out how to use a spoon and then use it to scoop food onto his plate. It is a daily problem, perhaps due to short term memory loss, and one I must endure every time I try to eat. Few people seem to understand the incredible urgency required in obtaining food in the dining hall. Twenty seconds can make a lot of difference when there are thirty people in line. I make it a point to know what I want when I get there and move efficiently.
The second most common wrench in the finely tuned machine of food-getting is when someone decides he really needs half of the french fries available on the line, and fills his tray with them; his compatriot takes care of the second half. Actually, french fries are at the end of the line. The true problem is when people pick something in the middle of the line, like fried chicken, and then everyone is forced to wait for the next batch to come up. Communication is minimal in dining hall, occluded by our desperate desire to eat, so even if you don't want to eat fried chicken and are really interested in something farther down the line, you still end up waiting for the fried chicken to come before you can get what you want. And by the time you get there, that's run out, too. Meanwhile, the line is growing shorter because students in the back have resorted to cannibalism, or the salad bar.
There's no quick lane in dining hall like there is in the supermarket, so move faster. I'm not saying that you have to, but I am saying that I've got some cages in my back yard that are just about the right size for wolverines...
posted by Meredith at 9:46 AM
4 Comments:
YES!
I wholeheartedly agree.
Thank you for blogging on such an important topic.
Um...
Can't you squeeze past the kids waiting for fried chicken? Or is your cafeteria line extremely restrictive, like, for example, the set-up in a slaughterhouse?
We can get past the kids waiting for fried chicken, yes, but that's only after we realize what they're standing around for. If they're actually just moving really slowly or you're too far back to see, people could potentially go apeshit and throw your head onto the dessert tray.
Solution: you need to have a server that monitors each supply of food. Just check the handy-dandy LCD monitors above the lunch line to see what's available and what's out, with an estimate of wait time (>10s? too long, move on with life)
Moral of the story: add networking to everything
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