The Dogs Aren’t So Hot After All  

In an effort to reduce costs, the cafeteria at my workplace has switched to a self-serve buffet-style serving model. As is typical with these kinds of serving stations, you enter at one end of a particular serving area, grab a plate, and walk down the line adding the foods you want. It seems simple, right?

Recently, one of the serving stations was set up as a “hotdog bar.” The only problem is that the order of items when entering the station the normal way was: plates, fries, pickles/onions/relish, cheese sauce, hotdogs, and finally, buns.

After the first few people through the line had to keep moving back and forth across each other in order to get ingredients in a sensible order, a few of us pushed aside the ornamental display at the “end” of the line and moved a stack of plates there so that we could all just go through the station “backward” and have things in a more logical progression, though admittedly not the most logical as people who wanted to make cheese fries still had things a bit backward. We didn’t want to try moving hot pans of food to fix that, though.

This worked reasonably well, but as I was weighing my food to pay and leave, the head chef walked over and started having a meltdown about someone moving his display of stuff that wasn’t even for sale and moved the plates back to the fries end of the assembly line. People that went to lunch later than I did reported back that the station quickly devolved back to people reaching over, under, and around each other to assemble their hotdogs in the proper order and that food ended up spilled everywhere.

According to the calendar, we were supposed to have a repeat of the hotdog bar today. For some reason, they decided on chicken wings, instead.