When Students returned to campus after the long Labor Day weekend, they were in for a culture shock at Convo. Gone were the china plates and glass cups, replaced with food served on paper plates and drinks in paper cups.

The tray return, the spinning transporter of trays and plates from the dining room to the kitchen, stopped working on Friday September 4th. The timing was particularly unfortunate because with the start of the long holiday weekend, no parts could be ordered until the following Tuesday to fix the problem.

“I first found out that the tray return was down in email Friday evening,” GM of Dining Operations Fred Geib said. “Because it was a holiday weekend we had to wait until Tuesday for maintenance to come in and assess the situation. They pulled the transmission out and luckily we were able to order a part from California to fix it.” 

Geib said that the cause of the transmission failure could be age or something getting stuck. 

“The electric motor turns that transmission and something gave way on Friday. We aren’t sure if it was just old age on the transmission, or if something got caught as it was turning and caused it to shatter,” Geib said.

Geib made the decision to run dishes over the weekend due to the lower volume of students in convo because of the holiday. 

“We ran china this weekend. The dish washing machine is fine,” said Geib. “The problem was getting china and glasses from point a to point b. We ran dishes all weekend long and it wasn’t a big deal because most students weren’t here.” 

However when students returned, Geib choose to go with paper products.

“When you are doing a thousand students it changes the whole dynamics and we realized china wasn’t possible. We ran china through Monday dinner and then switched over to paper on Tuesday,” said Geib.

While switching over to paper may have been the right choice, it wasn’t a cheap one.

“Every time a student is eating a meal here it costs close to twenty cents a 

person between the paper plates, bowls, and cups,” Geib said. 

Geib estimated that convo serves 3,000 meals a day meaning it cost the university roughly 600 dollars a day to use non-reusable paper products. 

“On the plus side, it doesn’t take as many people to do it this way, so were able to cut back on staff a little bit,” Geib said. “That was able to help pay for some of the paper products.” 

Geib was thankful then that the company AU uses in California had the part ready to ship to fix the tray return on Sept.11, just one week after it initially broke.

“This was the best case scenario,” Geib said. “The worst case was that they didn’t have the part, they would have to had it custom made and that could have taken up to six weeks.” 

For Geib it’s all just another day at the job.

“This isn’t the first time something like this has happened,” Geib said. “I have been here 22 years, these kinds of things happen. Its what makes work fun, it’s not the same everyday.”