It's official -- your days of waking up late and still managing to cruise into work on time have ground to a halt. School is back in session and the streets are filled with cheerful parents who had spent the past ten weeks dreaming of the day that their beloved offspring return to the classroom. One week in to the new school year, teachers who had been pleading to the gods for just one more day of summer have begun to embrace their new students, secretly praying for no whammies.
Lunch ladies and other school staff also hope that there will be fewer hooligans running amok, leaving a trail of hot sauce and grape jelly in their wake. But inevitably, by the end of the first week, the usual suspects have started to rear their ugly heads.
5. Hoarder Jorge
Teaching your child skills like saving for a rainy day is admirable... but when they take that skill and begin hoarding honey mustard packets like a West Virginian prepper, lunch ladies begin to take issue. Budgets are tight and school cafeterias have to ration out ketchup and mustard packets like loaves of bread during the Great Depression. Don't mess with the hairnets, Jorge. Take your single slim packet of sauce and keep it moving.
4. Hot Sauce Hannah
Hot sauce Hannah wants generic hot sauce morning, noon, and night. She douses it on her fries, drowns her Mexican pizza in it, and spruces up her Normandy vegetables with the atomic orange sauce. The problem comes when the cafeteria runs out of her favorite spicy dressing, at which point all hell breaks loose. Teeth sucking, eye rolling, and dramatic convulsing ensues.
3. Ungrateful Gretchen
Ungrateful Gretchen often forgets her lunch money and has to ask for a free lunch. When she's given a cheese sandwich, she indignantly rejects the meal and argues that she deserves better. A simple "thank you for feeding me" would suffice.
2. Loudmouth Larry
After a spending the morning preparing meals for hundreds -- sometimes close to a thousand -- kids, all a lunch lady wants is to scoop mashed potatoes in solitude. Any hopes for a reasonable noise level goes out the window when loud-mouth Larry shows up in line. Larry is the kid who swallowed a microphone at birth and is completely ignorant to the concept of an "indoor voice." In addition to being noisy and generally insufferable, he also never stops talking to anyone in the line with him who will listen.
1. No Manners Manny
No Manners Manny is the worst of all of the offenders.The words "please," "thank you," and "excuse me" elude him. He argues with the cafeteria workers when they ask him to pipe down or stop harassing other students in the line. He's loud, petulant, and has zero home training and worse still -- he never misses a day of school, ever.
