By Tommy Quick ’22 News Reporter
On the whole, I appreciate our dining hall. It’s a difficult task to provide three meals for 500 people three times daily. Over the 5 years that my siblings and I have attended Mercersburg, there have been positive changes to our dining hall offerings. The pasta bar is generous, the switch to reusable plastic cups is frugal, and the elimination of tablecloths is clean.
That being said, there have been some questionable changes as well, the most egregious being the change to the new toasters. While there is much to be desired from the Chinese food and the salad tongs are an inconvenience, the new toasters are a menace to the community’s bread-eaters on a scale matched in the culinary world only by swallowing a rotting cabbage head.
There is no problem with the new toasters if one has all day to heat a piece of bread. But unfortunately we do not live in that happy world. The new toasters are inefficient. The rotating belt toasters took less than ten seconds to brighten a cold and unappetizing English muffin into something warm, inviting, and edible.
The new toasters take at least three minutes to merely warm the bread and another three for that nice golden-brown crust to form. At Mercersburg, we simply do not have the time to wait for six minutes to eat a piece of bread.
But this issue only worsens at a communal level. There are only four slots total for two toasters. Each slot takes about six minutes. That means that a grand maximum of four (but often just two) people can use the toasters at a time. Compare this inefficient waste of time to the belt toasters, which could heat many people’s bread in exponentially less time. While the two people in front of me are toasting their two bagel halves, I’ve already gotten my eggs and tea. During this time, the people behind me could have finished their omelets. For a community that claims to value conserving time, these toasters are a colossal waste.
While some may see replacing these toasters as a frivolous disregard for expenses, I see it as an investment that ought to be made. If the saying “time is more valuable than gold” is true, I see this proposition as a necessity. In fact, spending on the new toasters initially was more wasteful than replacing these abominations ever will be. They serve the community poorly. As long as they exist, the community is a poorer place.