The weekday lunch and dinnertime rush at the entrance to Brown's Verney-Woolley Dining Hall is well known to students on and off meal plan. The line of students winds through the hallways of the Emery-Woolley Hall, moving at a snail's pace, due in no small part to the fact that at the start of the line, there is usually a student card-swiper trying to please an apparently non-cooperative card reader.
To everyone's dismay, the student fails at this task all the time, repeatedly edging the card through the slot and hoping the machine will not emit a disappointing beep of failure. In the face of the long lines, the trial-and-error-based operation only perpetuates waiting time and the hunger of the impatient patrons.
While the continuous inefficiency of the service makes the hungry population wonder why students get paid to do this one job and still don't seem to be doing it well, to a large extent they are blameless. One full-time Brown Dining Services staff member serving the Sharpe Refectory's entrance said she once served at the V-Dub entrance and found that their machines are particularly hard to work with. Anyone not well-trained would find it impossible to get a card through without multiple trials and a very delicate swiping movement through the card slot.
Dining Services not only has failed to update the ridiculous V-Dub machines, but they also seem to have forgotten to prepare student employees for the difficulties of their work. A friend of mine works as card-swiper at the V-Dub on Fridays, when popular chicken fingers attract constant traffic. On her first day of work, she was just pushed into this crucial card-swiper position without training or notification of any of the challenges she might face.
As a result, she had to swipe each card very slowly, usually more than three times, while the line continued to build up. In her frustration at the card reader and stress at the fact that she was holding up the traffic, she exclaimed in great distress that the machine hates her.
I wondered why Brown Undergraduate Dining Services did not have a better training and placement program that prepares student employees for service jobs. Clearly BuDS did not prepare my friend for what was coming as a card-swiper, nor did they consider how fit she was as a first-day worker to handle the double stress of an impossible card reader and an endless line of groaning patrons. As a result, she was left completely helpless in face of the lunchtime crunch.
The V-Dub crisis is but one instance of Dining Services' poor training and quality control system behind the muffin tables or salad bars. Some evenings at Josiah's, the salad station works with streamlined precision. On other days, only one worker slouches behind the bar, sluggishly assembling the salads while being frequently confused about the orders given.
We all remember BuDS's student hiring tables at popular campus locations at the start of the semester. We appreciate the idea that every student can work for Dining Services. But whomever they hire, it is their responsibility to make sure their staff work with some level of professionalism, regardless of their part-time status. It is not acceptable, for instance, for the Ivy Room cashiers to chat away endlessly with an acquaintance while a long line of customers is in a last-minute rush to purchase food.
According to the BuDS Student Worker Handbook, student workers are evaluated over time by student supervisors. BuDS attempts to control the quality of performance via student management, who "give written commendations to student workers who go above and beyond the standards of work performance."
But we don't know who makes up this student management, what those commendations are based on, or if student patrons' feedback was part of the evaluation process at all. How do we balance BuDS's generosity with job offers and a potential end result of screwing up students' meals because they did not provide enough training for student workers?
But there might be hope for an improvement in the V-Dub crisis. BDS is getting several new card readers, and this time, they should be assigned to the rescue of V-Dub's hungry population and the sweating card-swipers. Hopefully with the kindness of Dining Services, those students, already weighed down as they multitask text messages and class readings at their jobs, can soon master the art of card-swiping, so that each card does not require the level of high concentration, precision and patience required in their science labs.
Sissi Sun '12 is a theater and mathematical economics concentrator from Chicago. She can be reached at siqi_sun@brown.edu.
