For many students at OHS, lunchtime is their favorite part of the day because it is a chance to catch up with friends and relax. While these are all positive attributes, lunch can easily get chaotic in the cafeteria and cause students to get rowdy.
The excitement of getting lunch mixed with seeing your friends creates a very loud atmosphere for you to eat your lunch.
“I think that lunch is a great time to talk to friends but it gets really loud in there really fast so I think the atmosphere of everyone being in there becomes very chaotic very fast,” said Lily Burns, junior.
Among the loud voices, the cafeteria is very crowded, with lines for food weaving in and out of the tables it feels congested in there.
“It’s the way the tables are set up; it’s not very organized. I think that the lines being right next to the tables doesn’t leave a lot of room for people at the tables.and the scattered trash cans get in the way,” said Jackson Yu, junior.
Sitting inside at lunch is very hard to do as most tables are taken by upperclassmen. Many tables are so full that people share chairs which makes it almost impossible to walk between tables to get from place to place.
“It’s very hard to get a seat in there, most tables have more people sitting at tables than they have chairs,” Yu said.
Another quick way the cafeteria gets crowded is the large number of people who cut in the lunch line to eat their food faster.
“Majority of people sneak into line rather than just waiting, whether it’s just to talk to their friends or to actually get food, they still get in the way,” Yu said.
The large groups of people cutting make the lunch lines unpleasant and typically makes the line take much longer than needed.
“It’s very annoying to deal with, I could be next in line and then a big group of kids will just step right in front of me and I will have to wait even longer,” said Emma Lewis, sophomore.
The chaos with lunch isn’t just inside, the chaos is continued outside, mostly in the outside lines.
“Sometimes getting food outside will take the entire lunch period, the line sometimes is all the way down to the steps, and it doesn’t help that people will duck under the poles to sneak into the line,” Burns said.
Most students would prefer to eat lunch in a calm environment and several students have their own personal opinions about how the lunchroom chaos can be fixed.
“I think that if everyone followed the Learn, Lead, and Contribute rules then the lunch time would be more calm, enjoyable, and less chaotic for everyone,” said Chris Ho, junior.
