Ben Jones ’03 was leaning over a table, doing math.
“So it’s 420 plus the 300 I worked during the summers,” he said, “plus about 100 other summer shifts, I’d say, that I worked during college. Then the three weeks before the semester started … that’s another 120.” He paused. “That’s going to be up dangerously close to a thousand, isn’t it?”
That’s 940, yes.
“That’s a lot of shifts,” he said, impressed. “Yeah.”
Jones, who will graduate Monday with a degree in mathematics, has been working in Cowles dining hall since the first Clinton administration.
“I started the summer after eighth grade,” he said. “I was just looking for a summer job to make some small amount of money.”
Jones doesn’t know how much he made that summer, but he remembers that he enjoyed it enough to come back after ninth, eleventh, and twelfth grades as well. And, of course, enough to apply to work at Cowles again when he enrolled at Grinnell, though he ended up with a room in Loose.
“During the summer, there was a group of us, a group of friends,” he said. “There was a full staff and a hundred kids coming in to eat. So clearly there’s not very much to do for the workers. So we made up fun games. We managed to get the supervisors mad at us a lot.”
Jones remembers he and his colleagues surreptitiously moving signs around the dining hall, sending old special-dinner decorations into the stratosphere with 30 helium balloons, and composing a song about their supervisor, to the tune of “Danny Boy.”
“When I was a freshman in college, I was pretty sure I was going to work here for four years,” he said.
He’s somewhat less enthusiastic about the job these days, he said. Maybe that’s because people seem to get up to fewer stunts than they used to; maybe it’s just because you can only pull so many plates through a dishwasher before you need a change.
One of the biggest reasons Jones has remained at Cowles for so long, he said, is lead student employee supervisor Lyle Bauman. Bauman came to the job five years ago, and the two have become friends. (Jones, incidentally, is fairly sure he’s worked at Cowles longer than any of the adult employees except Betty Wells, the dining hall’s other student employee supervisor.)
Bauman, Jones guesses, is a big reason many people work at Cowles. Jones remembers the choir of Cowles employees that Bauman organized two years ago. The group sang carols during the holiday season and performed “On Top of Spaghetti” at the ISO talent show. (Jones played a meatball.)
Bauman also invites Cowles workers to his farm some semesters.
“Actually, since I’ve been at college, a lot of the best food I’ve had has been at Lyle’s house,” said Jones.
Appreciating dining hall food, Jones said, requires a little more strategy. First of all he says, is to veer for the basic; cooks don’t do well with foods they don’t cook for themselves, so staples like basic carved meat are usually safest. The second is to show up early: the less time your dinner spends waiting in the oven, the better. Finally, Jones finds it’s best to approach dining hall food with an open mind.
“The chicken Marsala would be my favorite example,” he said. “One of the things the dining hall does not have in its stock is Marsala wine. It has never had Marsala wine. … My mom makes a great chicken Marsala, which tastes many times better, [but] I actually eat the chicken Marsala in the dining halls. I think it tastes good. It just doesn’t taste like chicken Marsala.”
Jones’s feelings about his job of eight years aren’t, as it happens, dissimilar. He makes the most of it.
“It’s not the best job in the world,” he said, “but it’s not very difficult and I’ve always found there are always entertaining aspects to it. While the job itself might not be entertaining, somehow most of us have managed to make it entertaining.”
—Michael Andersen