First of all, you are not entitled to a free meal. Just because the dining hall closes at nine does NOT mean the Pub is morally obligated to give you a free meal, at no benefit to itself, just because you didn’t plan well enough to eat before nine and are incapable of purchasing your own food. So stop complaining about the limited menu choices, because you know what? You are getting those for FREE. We’re not going to give you our highest priced menu item for free; we would never turn a profit. The prices of the real food are not that bad as it is, which is most likely why the Pub struggles so much to make a profit anyway. In any case, you need to stop acting as if you are entitled to this free meal, just because you have a meal plan, and when the system blocks you from getting a meal transfer because you’ve eaten at the dining hall seven hundred times today, you do not have the right to get upset with us. For one thing, we did not make the system. That was done by the meal plan people, who make us do this because they’re worried you’ll wither away and die without your daily chicken sandwich. For another, just buy some food! In the real world, your parents won’t be there to spend thousands of dollars a semester on your meal plan. Eventually you’ll have to pay for your own nourishment, and you might as well get used to that now.
Second, the fact that you all decide to come in at ten thirty, half an hour before we close, means that you automatically are not going to get the best service. We have two kitchen people on staff to make food at that time, because all the others are engaged in preclosing to allow them to leave by at least half an hour after midnight. If you bring a thousand people in from the res hall at ten thirty, it will be busy. The lines will be long, the food will take a while to make, and we WILL put it in a to go box because you are not going to sit in the Pub after we have closed and make us wait on you. We are students, the same as you, and are probably taking harder and more advanced classes anyway and cannot be at work until two in the morning every night, which would happen if we didn’t preclose almost everything by the time you decide to drag your lazy selves in to get food. We will probably be out of chicken sandwiches, which I know are the only meal transfer item that you people think is halfway decent. Let me be clear here: WE HAVE CHICKEN SANDWICHES EVERY DAY. If I hear one more person say “what’s the meal exchange…equivalency…thingy today?”, well I’ll probably respond with an exasperated sigh and say “We’ve changed it to where EVERY day we have veggie burger, house salad, Caesar salad, hot dog, and chicken sandwich, but we’re out of chicken sandwiches right now.” Because I’m not allowed to be rude to you ignoramuses because I would lose my job. However, the point is that at the end of the night, we will run out of stuff. That’s how it works. If you would come earlier, you wouldn’t have to have the inconvenience of your favorite meal item not being there, or having to switch lines twice because your crowd of lazy late eaters has made it so busy that although I am finally done making drinks and am free to take orders on the second register, I can’t take anymore because the two chefs in the kitchen are overloaded by the amount of orders we’re taking. In order to avoid this, come earlier when we are staffed for a crowd, or for the love of god don’t come at all. We really, truly, would not suffer at all if no one ever got meal transfers.
Third and finally, do you not see how hard we are working for you? The two people working the front, the one person running food, and the manager on duty are all moving as fast as they possibly can to help you. We’re making drinks, getting sodas, ringing people up, answering phones, running food, making frappucinos, giving free refills that could get us in trouble just because it’s too busy to ring you up and wait for you to complain about having to find 54 cents, and doing all this with a pleasant, maybe forced, but still happy attitude even when you are insanely rude to us. Sure there are some Pub employees that are slower than others, some who would like to duck outside and escape the rush for a while. But these people do not close. Our closing team is extremely efficient, and we all work as hard as we possibly can to get you what you need in a timely manner. I regularly give out free drinks as compensation for your meal transfer getting rejected, something that we at the Pub have absolutely no control over. I often make starbucks drinks a size larger to compensate for the fact that you’ve had to wait because we’re absolutely swamped and we are not staffed with enough people to have one barista. I never EVER charge for water, even though I’m supposed to. I apologize when you’re upset that we’re out of stuff, even when I’ve told you that if you came in earlier we would still have chicken sandwiches. You cannot even comprehend the amount of energy it takes to work at the pace we have to in order to keep you people from rioting. I know you can’t comprehend this because occasionally I get a non-freshman customer in the middle of a rush who is actually sympathetic, having worked through these situations, and is patient. You people are the opposite of patient. Your complaints hurt our feelings, or at least mine, because we’re trying so hard to do our jobs right but we are not prepared to take a huge rush thirty minutes before we close. It just can’t happen.
In conclusion, it is YOUR choice to come in when we are unprepared to handle a rush, and by that choice it is YOUR fault that we have run out of your favorite food item and cannot handle all of you in a timely manner. Therefore, instead of complaining about us and whining to us and expecting us to break your hundred dollar bills when we have one twenty in our drawer, think for a minute. Think about what you, yes you personally, could do to fix this unpleasant situation you are in. Could it be possible that coming in earlier, when we have more people working and have not run out of chicken sandwiches, might solve your problem? Could it be that if you thought about the situation from our point of view and realized what this job actually entails, you would understand how to best suit your needs and ours and what actions to take to ensure this? I honestly think it could. I think if you just followed our advice when we tell you to come in earlier for better service, you would be much happier greasy haired kiddos as a whole, and would be able to pause during games of dungeons and dragons and say to your friends “Hey, let’s go to the pub before they run out of chicken sandwiches.” This change in thought would make us extremely happy, and we would greet your with our happy faces, not our how-can-I-help-you,-you-giant-dick faces.
If you freshmen could read this letter and comprehend it, which I know is a lot to ask of a freshman attention span and brain power, you might learn something that could help make your experience at the Pub a much more pleasant time. I wish you luck in attempting to read this without rage-quitting after the first line.
Love,
An Overworked, Underpaid, Extremely Fed Up Pub Employee
PS. No we don’t serve alcohol after 10:30. Just stop asking. Also, when we close a trash can and put up a sign saying to use the other one and you pile your trash on top of that one, it kills us. We literally die a little inside. Please stop.
