Fifteen minutes may be enough time to save 15 percent or
more on car insurance, but it is not enough time to for a high school student
to eat lunch.
Eating lunch in 15 minutes has been accepted as the new norm
since the cafeteria instituted a new hardware and software system. Now the
lunch process has been taking 10 or 15 minutes longer than before. After four
hours of classes in the morning, every student looks forward to lunch. They
meet up with their friends, walk to the cafeteria, look for their meal and then
wait in line to buy it. This five minute process has transformed into a DMV-esque
experience.
Given that lunch is only a half hour it makes it very hard
to enjoy the free time that lunch provides. Instead it is a rushed process that
barely leaves enough time to eat. Since the system switch the hungry Staples
students don’t go directly to the cafeteria, instead they sit at their table
with their friends and wait some 10 minutes for the line to go down.
Some even skip buying lunch all together and bring their
lunches instead. For those willing to endure the long lines will wait so as to
be able to enjoy a few minutes with their “usual” Panini.
When the process was first put in place, most people assumed
that it would speed up once the cafeteria staff began to understand the system
better. But it has been three weeks and everyone is still waiting.
This process is the worst for students who have lab lunch. A
mere 15 minutes for lunch usually, if you subtract the time the lunch line has
been taking, that leaves zero minutes for science students to get or eat there
lunch.
This is supposed to be an upgrade, an improvement from the
older system. But everyone is still waiting to see how this is supposedly improving
the cafeteria. Was Chartwells aware that this switch might have negative
affects on the purchasing of food, and if so then why was the decision made to change
the process of buying lunch?
Rather than improving the already unorganized lunch waves,
this new technology has done nothing but create longer lines, a chaotic and
overstuffed cafeteria, and frustrated lunch cashiers making their best efforts
to understand how to work the keypad and computer process.
