Frequent FFC faux pas: the trash line

Picture this: it’s a typical Monday morning. You’ve got a 9 a.m. class — still don’t know why you decided that would be a good idea — and you wake up at 8:00. You’ve got plenty of time to get dressed and eat breakfast, but do you have enough time to bus your dishes?

You head over to the FFC around 8:15. You meet up with some friends and get up from your table at about 8:45 to throw away your trash and set your plate on the conveyer belt. You’re actually going to be on time to class today, but then you are faced with the weirdest and most irritating freshman quirk in history, the phenomenon now known as The Trash Line.

At the trashcans by the soda fountains begins a line so useless and infuriating that you stop, dishes in hand, frozen in awe of the exquisite line-making skills of the largest and most exclusive freshman class in Johns Hopkins history.

The line travels farther than is even remotely reasonable, wrapping around the FFC and ending up somewhere near the Hopkins waffle makers, which pointlessly but awesomely burn our school’s name into your breakfast.

You have no idea what to do — about the trash, not the waffles. You can’t wait in the line; your class is on the Engineering Quad and you were already late twice last week. Do you cut the line? Everybody would hate you! But you don’t really have any other options.

So you skip to the front of the line and squeeze yourself in. You scrape your uneaten, overripe cantaloupe into the compost bin and leave your plate on the sliding dish collector. And nothing bad happens. No one makes a fuss. No one yells at you about cuts, butts and coconuts. You simply leave your dirty dishes behind and head to class.

But as you’re walking, you start to wonder why there’s a line for the trash in the first place. It takes less than ten seconds to contribute to compost, and if it’s that easy to cut the line, why does it exist in the first place? Why doesn’t everyone just head straight for the trash without creating a waste-of-time line?

Is it because freshmen are so scared of breaking the laws that govern society that we are needlessly polite and orderly? Is it because we all eat in improbably large groups and all get up to clean our plates together? Is it because we just like lines?

Regardless of the origins of The Trash Line, it needs to be stopped. You can’t concentrate during your classes, but you blame it on Monday, not on your plotting against the nefarious, inexplicable line. When you finally end up back at your dorm room a few hours later, you get to work.

You’ll write a scathing piece for your News-Letter column about how horrible The Trash Line really is. You’ll make it funny and clever and relatable; everyone will empathize, even if they’ve never seen the terrible morning fiasco with their own eyes (we all hate you, students who don’t have class until 11:00 a.m.).

Every single person who reads your piece will want to take action, and everyone reads The News-Letter, right? After all, they are placed right outside the FFC. And The News-Letter’s got a history longer than The Trash Line itself, so it’ll be the perfect way to get the word out about your cause.

Somewhere along the road, you probably figured out that I’m not talking about you anymore, dear reader, but about myself. But this must apply to some of you, so here it is. A nice, soothing public service announcement amidst all this hard reading about insert actual news piece from this edition here.

This one’s for you, fellow freshmen. Please stop making lines to throw away your trash. It’s a trashcan. You really don’t need to form an orderly, single-file line. It’s not the DMV. Nobody is going to yell at you for breaking the rules, especially since the only real rule is to not throw away your plate. Don’t create a line unless you have some burning desire to waste time, and even if that is the case, don’t expect everyone else to follow you in your odd line-establishment escapades.

It isn’t difficult to not make lines. We do it all the time. Bring ice cream or cookies anywhere and you’ll quickly see how good we freshmen are at not making lines. And yet, somehow, there always seems to be a line for the one thing we want to do as quickly as possible: clean up after ourselves. Maybe that’s why we make the line, to put off the inevitable. Just give yourself a break, okay? Don’t make the line, and get out of the FFC and on to bigger and better things.