Kevin Carranza '05 is king of the dining hall. And he is always ready to rule.
Nobody is sitting at the card checking station outside Rockefeller College dining hall one recent Thursday night at 5:30. Hungry students are starting to arrive for Cajun catfish and mashed potatoes.
So Carranza walks up to two tables in the dining hall, where 10 student dining hall workers are finishing their dinners. A freshman worker from Belgium instantly leaps from his seat to go swipe cards.
Carranza has worked in the dining hall since he began Princeton, finding a girlfriend, forging deep friendships and now overseeing all 72 student workers in the Mathey College and Rocky dining halls.
Student workers with significant financial need often find themselves in the dining halls because of the high wages offered. And many freshmen quit after the first term. But those remaining form a close fellowship, both with each other and non-student employees.
And, working in the dining hall offers a glimpse, as Carranza put it, "of the real world at Princeton. It keeps you real."
Carranza's seniority is not the only reason he's king: He can show off special skills.
A half hour into dinner, in the kitchen that links Mathey and Rocky dining halls, he asks Charlie Bergen '07, a curly-haired Tennessean, to step aside.
"Let me show you how to do it," Carranza says.
He takes three dirty soup bowls in one hand, rotates his wrist as though to throw a curve ball and flips the bowls into separate compartments of a massive washing machine.
It's Bergen's turn. He tries, but the bowls end up lopsided. He tries again. Same result. Then, a few moments after Carranza walks away, he throws two of the three dishes in two separate compartments.
"I can do it when they're not watching," Bergen says.
When Carranza was in Bergen's place — a freshman just starting out — he had no plans to stay in the dining hall.
Not a chance
A letter Carranza received the summer before he started Princeton contained just the news he didn't want to hear.
He lived in a one story home in Tampa, Fl., with his mother, a Catholic nursery school teacher. His father, an Army major, died during the 1991 Gulf War.
He described his upbringing as middle class: he drives a 1986 Honda Accord, his mom a van. They have two TVs.
Sitting at his kitchen table, Carranza opened the letter. He had been assigned to dining hall work at Princeton.
"It was like: No way I'm doing this," he recalled.
He had just quit summer work at a local Panera in the wealthy area of South Tampa, where he said he got fed up dealing with "snotty, angry people all day long." He disliked the grueling work of washing dishes into the early hours of the morning.
But he has always worked, having spent time as a florist's assistant and as a gopher in a law firm.
In the fall of his senior year, a friend dared him to apply to Princeton, promising to pay his application fee if he got in. When he succeeded, Princeton's new no-loan financial aid policy persuaded him to come.
Federal aid programs require students to work for about $4,000 of their tuition.
But arriving here in September 2001, Carranza was intent on earning that money someplace else.
He had no idea then that after missing a chance to quit the dining hall, he'd find out he wanted to stay.
'Anything we do'
Carranza planned to go through the first few days of student dining hall orientation and then grab a job at Frist Campus Center. He kept on saying to himself, "I am working in food service and that's not what I want to do." Mopping outside the entrance to Rocky dining hall on the first day of classes, he was going to tell his student manager he planned to quit.
But just as he started to talk with her, she was called away. It never came up again as he started to like the dining hall more, becoming a consistent member of the students who wash dishes during and after dinner.
"The kids were cool," Carranza said. "They were weird. They all seemed pretty good. They were cool with each other. They were interesting people."
The pay, one of the highest on campus, was important at about $9 per hour. Today he receives slightly more than $12 per hour, working from about 5 to 9 p.m. twice per week.
But the best part came at the end of his first term. Carranza, a comparative literature major, was having a hard time studying for a linguistics exam.
His roommate in Holder Hall, who also worked for dining services, convinced him to ask two girls in the class for help.
Carranza and Denise Purdie '05, also a dining hall worker, got talking.
They hadn't seen each other too much in the dining hall, since Purdie worked in the hall and Carranza in the back.
But their work in the dining hall was featured prominently in their relationship as they started to date and then became a couple.
"It's like you talk about the same place and it helps your conversation," Purdie said. "Anything we do, whatever any of us does, we end up talking about work."
Coming together
It has become something of a tradition in the dining hall to throw pies in the faces of student workers on Sunday nights.
Paul Reiter '05, a junior varsity basketball player who is sharing the position of dining hall coordinator with Carranza, was hit in the face with an Oreo cream pie three weeks in a row last year.
But it didn't seem to diminish his love for the dining hall.
He drew into a quad in Spelman Hall with three seniors, Timothy Allen, Daniel Fowler and Jacob Mikanowski, all dining hall workers for the past three years. Many dining hall works live in Spelman, opting not to join eating clubs.
To encourage these kinds of friendships, the student coordinators, with some financial support from Dining Services, hold a range of social activities outside the hall.
"We all get together to watch movies, and we have parties together," Purdie said.
Butler and Wilson colleges, with 82 student workers, and Forbes College, with 20 workers, also arrange activities. On some weekends, Butler/Wilson and Mathey/Rocky workers go head to head on Poe Field in sports games.
'Do something about it'
Even with this fellowship, the job has its low points.
On a recent Sunday night, Mikanowski was manning the card checking station in Mathey, reminiscing with Reiter and Allen about their history in the dining hall.
Suddenly a freshman rushed past, knocking a vase and flowers off the table Mikanowski sat at.
The vase broke. The glass shattered. And the freshman continued down the first few stairs.
Mikanowski stared, sending him a clear message of annoyance.
The freshman stopped in mid-stride down the stairs.
"Do you want me to do something about it?" he asked. "Don't worry about it," Mikanowski said wryly as a student worker in a green apron arrived, broom in hand.
The roommates said someone makes a mess almost everyday and leaves it for the workers. One of their big complaints is that students do not push in their chairs after eating. The worst is times when students loosen a saltshaker so that when a worker picks it up at the end of the meal, salt spills everywhere.
"You end up cleaning up after people all the time," Purdie lamented.
She said she originally felt ambivalent about "serving your friends," adding, "I didn't know if I wanted to do that."
Carranza said he sometimes gets odd, blank looks from students eating in the dining hall when he comes out in a food-covered apron.
Some students who need to earn higher wages are, to some extent, forced to stay in the dining halls. International students, for example, cannot work for student agencies because of employment laws. Others just prefer more money.
Still, more than half of freshman employees at the dining hall quit each year. They go to jobs, mostly lower-paying, in the libraries, Frist or elsewhere.
Several who quit said they left for personal reasons, not because of a problem with how the dining hall is run.
"It's just the kind of work some people don't want to do," Purdie said.
'Working for their livelihood'
Those who stay say that in addition to the friendships they forge with each other, they appreciate working with the non-student employees.
"You see people working for their livelihood," Carranza said. "It puts things in perspective.'
Student workers become friends with the permanent workers. There have been fishing outings, parties and many a long discussion.
One popular adult employee is Roosevelt Charles, a Haitian immigrant who has worked in the dining hall for three years.
Charles doesn't speak English well, but Carranza enjoys hearing stories about growing up in Port-au-Prince.
And Charles says he appreciates the assistance of students.
"The students have helped me here," he said in Creole. "If I have a lot of work, they help me."
He added, in English, "We try to be a family."
One of the oldest employees in the dining hall is Jorge Franco, a senior cook who has worked at the University for 29 years.
He reminds the students to put up the proper signs over the foods so people with allergies don't pick up the wrong food.
"We make nice friendships," Franco, who is called "Poppy" by everyone in the dining hall, said.
At reunions, he said, "I like to talk with students who have graduated a long time ago. It is nice to see them."
Just one night, again
At 7:25 they crank up the purple boom box. It is the end of dinner on that Thursday, and Carranza is filling in for the freshman from Belgium who's left the card checking position to go wash dishes.
A song by rap artist Nelly goes on, and the tempo in the room picks up. Students and adult workers start cleaning more quickly.
Then everything comes to a stop. A loud crashing sound is heard. The boom box is turned off.
One of the student workers has dropped a dozen plates on the ground. A few have shattered. The young worker responsible looks a little scared.
Carranza arrives at the scene. So does Purdie. They grab brooms and pick up the big pieces of glass. Purdie smiles. So does Carranza.
The music blasts again.
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