Murphy's Law

Today I didn't have time to fix a lunch, so I planned to just buy school lunch.

These days, when school lunch is served to a class, the students line up in alphabetical order (by last name), which they call "lunch line order".  As the students file past the workers at the two touch screen computers, each student calls out his/her name and the worker touches a photo of that child on the monitor.  This debits the student's account for the cost of that day's lunch.  Then the child is free to walk into the kitchen area and select a tray of food.  Usually, this is a very fast, efficient system.

Today, there was a snag.

The server was down.

I don't mean the food servers, I mean the Internet server.  The lunch program runs ONLINE!  There was a tech at the school working on the server and took it down for about 30 minutes today and failed to take into consideration the fact that about half the school was backed up in the hallway, waiting to be served lunch!  They really need to have an emergency plan in place to deal with this sort of thing.

What crappy timing I have!  I would choose a crisis day to try and buy school lunch.

I gave it up as a bad idea.  The server finally came back online, but half of my lunch period had already gone by, and there were still lots of classes impatiently waiting.  Fortunately, I had a couple of dollars in my pocket, so I bought a soda and a bag of chips out of the vending machine in the teacher lounge.  What a horrible lunch, though!  I know I will be starving when it is time to go home.  At least it isn't that much more nutritionally worse than what the lunch room is serving.

Today is pizza day.

***

Incidentally, the Jr. high/high school lunch program runs very much like always; students pick out what they want to eat, and how much of it, then pay for it out of their accounts.  The only significant difference is how they pay.  There is a pin #/scan machine to pay.  They can either punch in their student # or scan the bar code on their student ID.  Helena only ever buys a Gatorade, so her money lasts a long time.  Will buys main line usually, so he runs out of money more often than Helena does.

Also, at the elementary level, kids who are out of money are allowed to run up a tab of about $5.00.  In Jr./high school, if you are out of money, tough cookies.  You don't eat.  If you picked out food and you have no money to pay for it, you will be cleaning the lunchroom to pay for your meal (as my son has found out because he forgets to keep track of his balance).