The spirit to serve
This past Saturday was probably one of the busiest days we have experienced yet this year. We had an open house for 5000 people at Mullins, home coming weekend, a football game in the afternoon, on top of our weekend dining at both DCs and campus center. We were ready and excited for these events. We had an enhanced Taste of Home menu in place for Saturday lunch featuring recipes from parents and it was to be an opportunity to showcase our award-winning facility, to meet potential students and their parents; as well as homecoming guests.
Two of my managers Dianne and Ryan were at Mullins early setting up the booth for dining services; in addition, our catering manager, Brenda, and her staff were also there since 7:00 am to set up the breakfast services for 5000 guests. Our staff and managers at all the DCs and Blue wall staff were busy getting ready for the enhanced brunch menu; we even brought in extra staff. I was at Mullins around 9:00 am and we were busy handing out UMass knapsacks and answering questions about meal plans, everything was going like clockwork. It was so nice to meet potential new students, and one in particular and their mother and talk to them about SOM, my ala mater; they traveled all the way from LA to look at our HTM program. Later, I even had time to peek inside and to hear part of the welcome speech from our chancellor.
It was close to noon, when I was on my way back to my office with plans to greet some parents and UMass alum at the DCs before heading to Campus Center for our presentation. My phone rang, and it was one of my managers calling to notify me that there wasn’t any power at Worcester DC, next another manager called about the same problem at Hampshire DC, next David from Campus Center let me know about the situation there as well. With several phone calls, we realized that all of the DCs, except Franklin, were affected, as well as the Campus Center. We decided to go ahead and open the doors just the same, so that our students could have something to eat in spite of the lack of power. We were concerned about safety issues of our staff working in the kitchen, and our customers, but the spirit to serve took priority. Our food was fine in the beginning but quickly became cold without electricity. We had to adjust the menu and try to make the best of things and see to it that our customers had something to eat. Our customers were very understanding and our staff were calm and professional and they did their best to serve our customers with very limited resources. At Berkshire, we had to close the door for 20 minutes since the emergency lights went off completely and the dining room was pitch dark. As for our Taste of Home special, we will run this special again the way it should be done. It was a very unfortunate time to have a power outage with the Homecoming Weekend and Open House; and on Monday morning I will find out just what led to the outage in the first place.
I salute the UMass dining staff for their spirit to serve and our apologies for any inconvenience to our customers.
Ken Toong
Director
Contact Ken at ktoong@mail.aux.umass.edu