By Sean O’Brien
Contributing Writer
As St. Bonaventure students, we are privileged to have numerous options when it comes to dining. At certain times of the day, it seems that for many hungry young minds there’s only one choice: the Hickey Dining Hall.
The entire student body seems to be crammed into the Hickey at specific points during the day, namely the typical times people eat lunch and dinner. Yet very few students ever seem happy to be there and even fewer appear satisfied with the selection offered to us.
We students will scan over the choices at the Home Zone station with our faces puckered in distaste. Meanwhile, an ARAMARK employee scrambles to keep the serving trays well-stocked so we may gorge upon as much as we please of our particular favorite of that day’s menu choices.
As the person who prepared this food presents it to us on a silver-colored platter, we turn up our noses and comment on how gross or disgusting something is, often to their faces.
As someone who works in the food service industry during breaks, I can personally confirm that yes, the workers can in fact hear what you say about the fruits of their labors and yes, your words do affect them. I’m not saying you don’t have the right to dislike something. If something isn’t to your taste, leave it be and please, feel free to eat something else. However, there is a time and a place for criticism, as well as a particular decorum with which to deliver said criticism.
ARAMARK actually has an open forum committee that meets on a monthly basis specifically to accept suggestions and constructive criticisms that members of the student body may have. Unlike the rude comments spoken as if the employee wasn’t there, comments made during the committee meetings might actually make a difference and don’t hurt someone’s feelings.
The real issue I have with the Hickey-bashing tendency is that it can hurt the feelings of someone who is a really nice person and can’t control what he or she makes.
If it’s anything like my workplace, everything has to be made a very specific way in a specific order to a specific recipe to keep everything to an especially high specification of health and consistency. Any deviation from these strict specifications is very severely frowned upon, and could eventually result in someone’s termination if the worker in question bends the rules on our behalf for too long.
It’s also not like the ARAMARK workers don’t know how the food tastes. Let’s face it, if they want a meal, they have to eat the same stuff we do.
When we were children, we were taught sticks and stones break bones, but words can never harm us. We’ve all lived long enough to know from experience how false and ridiculous that phrase is.
Again, I’m not saying you have to like everything served at the Hickey, but please respect and appreciate the effort and work that went into providing the virtually endless supply of food available to the mass of ravenous college students each day.
Considering how they’re dealing with college students all day, having a little bit of respect and gratitude is the least we, as both students and quality human beings, can give the ARAMARK workers on campus.
