Part of my job is to stand at the door of a cafeteria and keep the people who are eating from leaving. Many of them attempt to do so; I have to check credentials, review and evaluate their itinerary, and make a quick decision on whether I believe their intent matches their stated goals. Some people make the grade and are allowed to pass, others are rebuffed and sent back to their tables, not always with grace. In the rare moment when I’m not interrogating eaters, I observe the people at the garbage cans, two of which are positioned a few feet from me at my door post.
When finished eating, the diners are obliged to dump their food into the garbage and then stack their tray. The trays in this particular dining establishment are hard, molded plastic with partitions. This means that they beg to be stacked. If you questioned the trays, they would all state unequivocally that aside from having food on them, the one thing they want most is to be stacked.
And this is what I see.
Some diners–okay, I’ll give up all pretense that this is a swanky five-star restaurant. This is a school cafeteria I’m talking about. This is what I see the kids up to at the garbage cans, and I can’t help but wonder if I can read their futures in those three seconds.
A few kids drop their trays into the garbage with food. No stacking. Of course, they don’t get away with this, but this is their first impulse. This personality type concerns me. Maybe. These are either future felons or Fortune 500 CEO’s. Or both. Or at least they’re the big dreamers, too preoccupied with the infinite potential of life to worry about a mere tray. Another possibility is inattentive laziness.
The vast majority of the remainder fall into two groups–the neat stackers (or ‘nesters’ ) and the sloppy stackers. Most kids are sloppy stackers. The sloppy stackers insouciantly place the tray on the tray stack but ignore the tray’s call to be nested. Remember, this above all is what that tray wants: to be nested with its tray mates. Many kids don’t give it a second thought–a sloppy stack and off they go. That’s most of them. Others seem to enjoy positioning the tray at the top of the stack in a precarious, non-nested position. It’s dangerous–a non-nested stack is easy to tumble and makes an ear-splitting noise when it falls. These kids live somewhat on the edge and have a high threshold for endorphin release.
A small portion of the kids are nesters. I’m a nester myself. Probably a lot of teachers are. At the beginning of the school year I winced whenever a non-nester showed up at the tray table. I did a lot of wincing. Now I’ve let go of it and merely observe. Okay, I still wince a little bit, because for us nesters, nesting is almost a moral imperative: How can you not stack a tray begging to be nested? It goes way beyond logic, reason and language. It’s pretty much a natural law that simply must be obeyed. Celestial bodies sweep out equal areas in equal time, E=MC2, and you nest trays whenever possible. End of story.
Among the nesters, some kids feel this moral imperative even more strongly and go out of their way to nest the entire stack. Some do this instinctively–they stack their own tray and in the same physical movement align the rest of the stack. Only then to they leave. Others nest their tray, move away, hesitate and return to finish the job. I mentally applaud.
I discovered a new category yesterday that pushed the boundary of understanding in this emerging field of Socio-tray Stacking. I saw a kid nest her tray, then she removed the top half of the stack and set it down to create two shorter stacks. I was stunned. It was as if I had discovered a new species of mold in the jungles of Borneo. This child may well go into risk management. I would hire her in a heartbeat to keep my business steady, on track and operational. But she’s only in second grade, so I shall have to wait.
And then we come to the special case whom I shall call Dee. I know Dee and work with him in a classroom setting. I teach him for a small part of the day. He’s a nice kid, but not easy to work with in class. Out of his chair all the time, fiddling with stuff, antagonizing others. He makes it challenging to deliver the District-mandated curriculum with fidelity, which is my main job at the school. But at lunch I see a different kid. Not only is Dee a born tray nester, he has somehow wangled a job with the cafeteria staff in which he gets to attend to the trays for a bit. He nests like crazy. He stands alert at the garbage cans. If he senses you’re a sloppy stacker, he takes the tray from you, sometimes a little too enthusiastically–he doesn’t stand any nonsense with the trays. It’s all business. The trays will be nested on his watch. He is a marvel on the job, and a bit of a disaster in class. I could spend another thousand words commenting on Dee and education, but I’ll leave it for the moment.
You can pay big bucks to take classes in sociology or psychology if you want, but I have a better idea: come spend ten minutes with me in the school cafeteria and I promise you will gain a semester’s worth of insight into the human psyche one tray at a time.
K-blog 