Chick-fil-A. Costco pizza. One of the most delicious parts of a student’s day is hot lunch, and, of course, many students purchase hot lunch every quarter. But it’s no secret that the hot lunch lines can get very, very long.

“If I’m at the front of the line [it takes] probably 5 minutes, but if the line is from the lunch window to the tables, then probably 20 minutes solid,” freshman Justin Essa said.

Some people’s strategy for dealing with the lines is to wait them out.

“I usually get out of the line and wait for it to get smaller and that takes 10 to 20 minutes,” senior Jacob Miller said. Miller gets hot lunch Wednesdays through Fridays.

Some students have the advantage of having a second period closer to the lunch quad. According to Essa, whose second period is study hall, “[Study Hall is] probably the most direct way to get there, other than French.”

Miller also agreed that location matters. “I’ve been getting to the front of the line pretty quick, because I’m in Chemistry, so I just go down the hall.”

Despite the tendency of the lines to reach up to 20 minutes, neither Essa or Miller were ever unable to finish their lunch before the bell rang, unless lunch was shortened. However, Miller remembers a day when he was unable to get his lunch at all due to a shortened lunch. “One of the days we had a lockdown drill, I wasn’t even able to get my lunch. A lot of people weren’t able to get their lunch.”

So, is there room for improvement? Yes. Many people go into the wrong lines and sometimes they even merge together. ”We already have got the names, we already got the four lines, but I see lines merging within others— utter confusion,” Miller said.

But it’s important to remember even in our frustration that ASB has a lot on their plate when it comes to managing hot lunch.“It’s hard because sometimes people don’t want to wait in lines, but other people want to buy, so if they don’t come in time we sell the food… They sometimes get angry at us or their parents will email us,” senior and ASB member Geneva Lindsley said.

It is not an uncommon occurrence for issues to arise, such the Friday when hot lunch arrived late. Students were dismissed near the end of 3rd period and did not have a lot of time to eat. “The person ordering [the pizza] forgot to order for that day,” Lindsley noted.📰 “We wanted to make sure students still got what they paid for, because that would be unfair to them, and refunds are really difficult to go through … We decided we still needed to get the pizza so that kids could eat, because we don’t want anyone to leave school feeling hungry when they paid for it …”

While ASB makes mistakes, they try their best to ensure that everyone gets the food that they rightfully paid for. Despite issues and long wait times, hot lunch is the best way to enjoy warm food . ASB works hard to manage the lines, and with the amount of students buying hot lunch, not much improvement is possible. Some of the issues are actually student caused. “Sometimes people [cut] others just to get with their group of friends,” Miller said. “People cut other people, [but] no words are even said about it.”

Hot lunch isn’t something we should take for granted. If you really want hot lunch, you should get it. If you don’t want it, you don’t have to get it. Pizza and Chick-fil-a every week, a dream of many students who don’t go to CAHS, are worth waiting for, despite the daunting lines.