PSA: ‘Dining Cams’ on MySU show how busy dining locations are!
Let’s be honest, Aramark doesn’t have the most efficient system for handling busy rushes. If you hit up Benny’s (aka the Hawk’s Nest) at the wrong time, you’re going to be waiting a minimum of 20 minutes to get your food. Then you’ll have to stand in a line that wraps around the salad bar because it’s extremely rare that the second register will be open. There are many reasons why orders pile up at our dining locations on campus, but that’s a conversation for another time. Right now, I’m here to tell you that you have had the ability to check how busy each location is, without leaving your bed, this whole entire time. I’m assuming that since I only learned about this yesterday, not many people on campus know that this exists.
On the Dining Services’ MySU homepage, there are the names of our 4 dining locations. All you have to do is click on a location to see the most current snapshot from the camera set up in that dining location. The images are updated about once a minute so you can refresh the page every so often to see if the lines have died down. Keep this in mind the next time you’re debating whether or not to go to Ele’s for lunch!
Ironically, I learned about this while sitting in a professor’s office and she told me that she checks the cams whenever she’s really desperate for entertainment. Conspiracy theory: Faculty/Staff don’t ever tell students these cams exist because they don’t want us to detract from their line-avoiding advantages. The professor who told me is still relatively new at SU so I think it’s very possible that the other faculty members haven’t gotten around to warning her to keep this a secret yet. Think about that the next time you’re waiting an excessively long time for your order and notice that professors always seem to show up to the caf or other dining locations just after the lunch rush…
Or maybe this is something that everyone has known about since Day 1 and I’m just hella late to the game.