Blast from the Past

I was reading a bunch of my saved documents from college, and happened across this letter that I posted on our school cafeteria's comment board. The board was designed for note card sized comments, but I took it a bit further by posting this...

Dear Wood Company:

I have just read the article in the student newspaper about your services. Although I am not fully satisfied with everything you have to offer, I believe that the letter was not fair to your company because it did a lot of complaining and didn’t list any solutions. Therefore, I would like to tell you a little about what I have observed my 3 semesters here at Mary Washington.

First of all, I am very pleased with your comment board. You always respond promptly to students ideas and if an idea is not feasible, you list the reasons why. This tells us that you actually do care about our concerns. Also, I understand that it is very difficult to provide for a large amount of students. You either please most the students some of the time or some of the students most of the time. It is a no win situation, and I congratulate you on putting forth your best efforts. With that said, I would like to list a variety of concerns that I have and possible solutions to remedy these problems.

The first thing I would like to point out, is your cakes. These cakes taste so good when they’re fresh! However, when you cut them up in individual slices, they quickly get stale because all four sides are exposed to the air. Why don’t you place the entire cake out uncut and let students cut the cake themselves? That way, you don’t have to worry about cutting the cakes, and we don’t have to worry about them getting stale!

The second thing, is the sodas. This seems like a very simple solution to a very frequent problem. A day doesn’t go by when all the syrup is gone from the soda machines leaving us with a glass of club soda. This past week, all the sodas but Dr. Pepper were out of syrup in the North Room. This leaves students with little options when the milk is frequently sour and the juices are just as watery as the sodas. If you could check the syrup on the machines more often, I do believe this could be solved.

Another thing I’m sure you have noticed is the ice cream. Have you noticed that after a while, the only thing that is left in the freezers are popsicles? This is because none of the students will eat them because of the thick coating of slime covering each one. If you could either order less popsicles and more ice cream, or find a way to regulate the freezers so the slime doesn’t appear, you’d have a lot more students eating the frozen treats.

Also, college students are scared of “gourmet” foods. I wanted to give you an example of a name of one of these foods but when I asked my friends, they all said, “I don’t remember… I don’t eat those.” And it’s true! The food in the South Room is unappealing mainly because of its “exotic” names. Instead of oranges and zucchini, serve things like mashed potatoes and gravy! Give us old fashioned foods that our mothers make like fried chicken and stuffing and corn instead of eggplant and rutabaga. I’m sure you’ll get a much larger response if the foods we are given are familiar to us.

Another concern we tend to have is that of “recycled food.” This means that one day, you’ll serve sweet potatoes and the next day, you’ll serve sweet potato soup. I understand your need to conserve, but it automatically triggers a red flag in our minds and we tend to steer clear of foods served the day before. A large concern of students is food poisoning and “recycled food” poses a huge threat to our weak tummies.

I hope that these suggestions were of a help to you and I thank you for your time.

Sincerely,

Michelle Lambiasi