Relying on a covert system of winks, blown kisses, and late night rendezvous, romantic couples working together at McClurg struggle to keep their love hidden from hostile higher-ups. While the management team at this Aramark outpost maintains that employees are welcome to date openly, the workers themselves offer an entirely different story, saying that many employees have faced intimidation, and even termination, for the unthinkable act of loving a coworker. I'm no casanova, but I know that we must extend the right to love, which is already enjoyed by students, professors, and administration officials alike, to our Sewanee brothers and sisters who do the thankless task of providing food on a daily basis.
Sources inside the castle-like facility speak of a vibrant, but
suppressed, love scene. All names and identifying attributes have been changed for reasons of anonymity. The first worker to come forward in this investigation, Roger, himself a bachelor, revealed that "managers, and from time to time salary managers, date employees, and workers date each other." He continued, "some couples have been living together for two or three years." One pair in particular, made of Sarah, a floor worker in her twenties, and Bobby, a cook in his forties, go to great lengths to avoid detection, kissing in the kitchen only when alone.
Unable to frequent the normal nearby dating venues for fear of exposure, they sometimes park out at the airport for an evening under the moonlit sky.
Yet not all of the relationships work out so well. The culture of secrecy at McClurg invites scandal, and sources reveal that the manager-level employee who was arrested on graduation day of 2009 for extracting $1,200 dollars from the company safe did so to pay off his mistress, who was herself working at the Dining Hall, and who remains an employee. When we multiply these two accounts by the number of potential romantic couples at McClurg
then the scale of the problem becomes all too apparent.
The unfeeling management team simply practices a policy as old and unsavory as the crunchy pasta served on Sunday nights. One innocent peck in the dining hall can lead to immediate termination. Further, there is no mechanism in place to openly manage the actual relationships, so it is only natural that odd situations might result. The solution, my horrified reader, is to introduce the "love contract," a legal document which would be signed by both workers, stating the two are engaged in a willing relationship. By creating a public record of all romances, the Dining Hall can prevent any possible conflicts of interest or otherwise undesirable situations.
Also, we must see a modernization of the employee training program. Nancy, working as a server for about a year, says that there is "one" training seminar a year, and that she missed it, together with the rest of her night shift, because it happened in the day. McClurg needs regular, carefully planned seminars, so that workers know their rights, and how to deal with issues like sexual harassment. The present situation will simply invite further employee discontent. So when you gorge on your soy soaked sausage spaghetti at McClurg, please remind yourself that our caretakers are still starving for a basic freedom: love.
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