The Cafeteria

I asked an intern if she wanted to eat lunch, and she agreed. When I suggested the cafeteria, however, she looked surprised. “The cafeteria? The tray meals? Like the workers?” That was the sentence I remembered.

I did not understand what was wrong with eating where the workers ate. We worked too. The fact that one job required an engineering degree did not make lunch a different biological process, and carrying a tray did not cancel anyone’s education.

University can quietly teach status together with knowledge. After years of difficult courses, exams, and technical work, the title “engineer” can begin sounding less like a profession and more like a rank. Then ordinary things become dangerous: a cafeteria tray, a bus, a cheap restaurant, anything associated with people supposedly below the new position.

I never liked that version of engineering. The engineers I respected could move between offices, workshops, technicians, managers, and operators without protecting the title every five minutes. They knew theory, but they also knew that the person standing beside a machine every day might understand something no diagram could show.

Lunch should have been easier. Take a tray, take food, sit, eat, return to work. It was an efficient system. Perhaps the cafeteria food was bad; that would have been a perfectly good reason not to go. But “like workers” was different because it turned a meal into a statement about status.

Years later, I do not remember what we ate or even whether we eventually went to the cafeteria together. I remember the sentence. And I still think the answer is simple: yes, like workers. We were at work.