It is so funny. I brought up the subject of the school cafeteria lady the other day with a friend. She described the school cafeteria lady she remembers from her childhood and she looked just like the picture above. I would like to be clear, though. None of the people working in my son’s school cafeteria look like that. In fact one of them, I imagine, looks like an angel.
Back when I was in school (you know, the school that I had to walk to 5 miles in the snow with no shoes) we had to pay for our lunch with real money. Nowadays you go online and load money on your child’s account. Your child gives their account number at the cafeteria and they charge the account. You have to pay a small processing but it so convenient. The thing that most appealed to be me was that you can add money and the site says your child’s account will be updated in minutes – or not.
The first day back to school after Christmas break, Brandon tells me his account is getting low. I go online and load it up thinking it will be ‘updated in minutes’. Now in their defense, I should have noticed the status column clearly stated that the transaction had not been completed yet. In my defense, I am ADD and was too busy to notice because I was on to the next task.
The next day Brandon’s account did not have enough money to buy lunch but they gave him lunch anyways. He told me he had a ‘negative’ balance. I found out later that ‘in minutes’ means that account takes up to six days to update as processing time varies by school (that is in small print). I called the school cafeteria and talked to a woman that verified that there was no more money in his account. She also told me she paid for Brandon’s lunch with her own money as she did not want him to go without lunch. I thought that was so nice. Brandon said she does that a lot for others, also. I now call her the Cafeteria Angel.
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