A beautiful Tuesday morning during Fall Break, while the squirrels merrily hoarded their nuts and the leaves rustled in the crisp breeze, I dragged myself out of bed and hauled myself off to work at Frist Campus Center. As tragic as my Dickensian labor felt, I was still looking forward to having an omelet for breakfast. What a fool I was! For the fickle winds of Fate would intervene in my breakfast quest, via a server we shall politely refer to as Barty.
I watched Barty make my omelet. He was efficient. So efficient, in fact, that he completed what I assumed was an omelet in about 30 seconds. By which I mean a hideous pile of fried eggs, cold cheese and half-cooked vegetables. I wasn't paying $5 for that crap. Indignantly, I marched off to the manager to complain.
"Go ahead and ask for a new omelet," was the nonchalant response.
How extravagant of me to expect the manager to tell the server to give me a good omelet! So I asked for another.
"Why?" Barty demanded.
"It's bad," I said, though I wanted to say, "It looks like an exploded tumor."
Barty's eyes grew wide. His face, mimicking the omelet, began to look like an exploding tumor.
"You want another omelet? I'll give you another omelet," he growled menacingly, making it sound like an omelet was slang for punches, bullets or grade-deflated econ papers. This time he finished it in a record-breaking 10 seconds. It was even worse than the first. It looked like a flu-ridden chicken had defecated in a rotting vegetable patch. I suppressed my gag reflex by thinking about kittens.
Naturally I demanded a refund, but I was stuck at Frist, starving. My low-carb breakfast had turned into a no-food breakfast. Angrily, I wrote a complaint letter to the Director of Dining Services Stu Orefice. Here's the reply I got.
"Thank you for your feedback. We apologize for the service you received and we recognize the depth of concern it takes to write directly to us. I would suggest that you review this incident with the Area Manager of Retail Operations. I will ask him to email you directly to set up a convenient time."
Besides the fact that a polite and soulless zombie-bot with a masters in buck-passing had secretly taken over the post of Director of Dining Services, I was miffed that I had to review the incident. What was there to review? I'd already described the incident in the letter. Why waste more of my time? I was so blindingly furious that I yodeled my award-winning Xena warrior princess cry, smashed through the Frist facade and pushed the earth backward around the sun so that time would reverse. I'm cool that way.
Still, I had to get to the root of my fury. I was mad at Barty, but that wasn't the point. Maybe he had a bad day. Maybe he was genetically predisposed to belligerence. Maybe it was the anniversary of his vasectomy. Whatever. What really got to me, though, was the feeling that Dining Services doesn't care about student opinion and are always trying to swindle us. Here are my personal gripes.
With a meal plan, every meal at the residential colleges costs between $9 and $11, depending on the plan purchased, which illogically makes charging for breakfast and lunch cheaper than buying a meal plan. This sum of money effectively goes towards subsidizing the enormous amount of wastage in the dining halls — my student-worker friends tell me several huge bins of food are sold as slop after every meal. Late meals are about $6 for lunch and $7 for dinner, which means that the $6 lunch you swipe actually costs up to $11. Taking into consideration that prices are already astronomically inflated at Frist, that's mind-numbingly exorbitant. Despite this supernormal profit, Dining Services is trying to make late meal as impossible as possible, countering high demand with even lower supply. Service at Wilcox and Wu (though not Rocky or Mathey) is abominable, because several servers at the grill are cranky and mean and take out their frustrations on you. Complaints, letters and petitions are futile because nobody listens or cares. Meal plans are obligatory for underclassmen, which props up the Dining Services cartel-dictatorship in a stylish throwback to food-for-aid programs. Most importantly, I can't keep reversing time whenever soulless zombie-bots try to take over the world. Johann Loh is a sophomore from Singapore. He can be reached at loh@princeton.edu.
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