It’s a dark, stormy day. You’re driving to school, desperate to get out of your car and into school on time. Keep in mind you’re running late. As you pull into the driveway, the harmonious bell of Foothill sounds.
Your eyes dash about the parking lot, hopelessly searching for that magical parking spot. And right as you find a parking spot, boom. The space is gone, the bell rings, and you’re tardy.
To avoid spot-stealing, Foothill sells parking spots to student drivers for $20. But now, imagine another scenario.
It’s a rainy day; you’re confidently walking straight down the quad, textbooks in hand, making a beeline straight through the soaking wet crowd to your table, where you expected to find your friends under a large, protective, vibrantly-colored umbrella.
Instead, you arrive to a table full of freshmen, sophomores, juniors, or seniors. Whoever they are, they are not your friends.
Why are they sitting at your table? You’ve sat at that table for the whole year! You’ve laughed at that table; you’ve cried at that table; you’ve mercilessly tied your friend’s backpack to that table. That’s your table! You invested your whole year in that table, and now strangers have it. In your mind, you have been cheated.
You just weren’t fast enough, and it’s not like that parking space you own. You can’t go tell anyone it got stolen because it’s not your property.
But what if it was? Not permanently, but temporarily. You can’t buy a table, but should you be able to?
I have personally experienced the disappointment and anger involved with getting a table stolen. Every school day, there is a group of students that tries to sit at my group’s table. Being upperclassmen, they are permitted to leave campus. When they do manage to obtain the table before us, they usually just use it as a place to keep all of their school supplies while they go off campus, rather than actually sitting at the table.
It is one of the most frustrating things in the world, and there’s no real way of resolving the situation, other than stealing someone else’s table. It’s a chain reaction.
Junior Paige Treloar-Ballard has also experienced having her table stolen.
“We got to our table early and sat there. We put our stuff on the table. Then, some sophomores came over, pushed our stuff off of the table without even asking, and sat at our table. [That] made me very upset. We’re high schoolers now, not middle schoolers. We should be mature enough to know not to steal the tables,” she said.
Students need a reliable place to sit during lunch and break. Having a reserved table so that my friends and I don’t have to keep worrying about our lunch seating would take a lot of stress off of our backs.
But for now, students will have to sprint to their tables. No one will know for sure if they even have a place to eat lunch with their friends every day.
