:: Running from the Thought Police ::

:: Monday, March 13, 2006 ::

About Food And Procuring It

(This is just general griping. Ignore it if you wish.)

So tonight Dining Services decided to have a theme night, where they try to make it look like they care about the food they serve and give us something different. This one was a little bit different from those, even, since their theme was "Beach Party" and they were featuring cuisine from different places at different locations in the dorm system. Since the menus for each location was posted online, this was no problem - merely look up where the food you wanted to eat was at, and go there for dinner. Whoop-dee. The gf and I decided that of the night's offerings we wanted to eat corn dogs, and so off we went to Peabody Drive Residences to eat.

So we get there, and the line's insanely long. One thing to understand about Peabody is that, like Gregory Drive Residences, its dining area is split into three dining rooms, one for each hall served by the area. Peabody's private dining room is much bigger than Gregory's (which, currently, is serving not as a private dining room but as storage...) so that effectively cuts peabody down to two dining rooms for seating. Like Gregory, all of Peabody's operating dining rooms have the capacity to form at least one serving line, if not two. This works out so that both Peabody and Gregory currently have the ability to have three operating serving lines, one for each dorm served by the area.

Now, back in the day (i.e. when I was a sophomore) the Peabody dining room that only had one serving line didn't do normal meals and instead handled late night, taking it out of circulation, while a whole dining room at Gregory was effectively mothballed for no good reason. Fortunately, for my junior year, they moved late night to the mothballed dining room, theoretically opening up the old late night location at Peabody. Three semesters later and this apparently hasn't happened, which brings us back to the long line my gf and I were standing in. Had the third line been open, there wouldn't have been two dorms worth of people, at least, trying to merge into one serving line and causing a twenty minute wait.

So, after this long wait just to get a normal meal, as opposed to a specialty restraunt meal, the gf and I get to the front of the line to find that all of the corn dogs are gone, with an hour left to go in the meal. Judging by local conversation, the severe disappointment in the lack of corn dogs wasn't just shared with my gf and myself - it was the main reason most of the people were at that specific cafeteria to eat.

To make a long story short (too late), Peabody dining services needs to open the Snyder Hall serving line during peak flow (especially since its not being used for anything else) and they need to do a better job estimating how many people will show up for a meal. Running out of an entree with ten minutes left to go is one thing. Running out with an hour remaining in the meal is another thing entirely.

:: The Squire 9:19 PM :: email this post :: ::
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