So there was Tony, on the other line, asking me what to do about $591 of spoiled meats, cheeses and vegetables. I could already imagine what the Sylvan Snack Bar must have smelled like. The rotting salamis probably stunk up the whole basement floor of McNamara Hall.
Nothing in my business classes had prepared me for this. I had joined the Center for Student Businesses (CSB) as a Student Business Consultant five semesters before, hoping to learn more about how to make financial statements for the student-run businesses on campus.
And here I was now, clueless about how to re-open the small snack bar, after a blackout during Thanksgiving last semester had warmed the fridges and wiped away our chances of selling sub sandwiches for the last few weeks left of school.
At the next staff meeting, we decided to close. The snack bar would not open till the next semester. We had to swallow the losses and move on.
Tony didn't show it, but I knew he was very upset. Then again, I couldn't expect anything else.
If you ever came down to Sylvan Snack Bar when Tony was working, you knew your sub was in good hands. He was one of those employees that any business could only dream to have. His passion was reflected in the quickness of his hands. He knew how to make a sub.
Once while he was preparing a sub, one mushroom fell out. He caught it in mid-air and returned it to its place. He then wrapped the sub up and handed it to the customer with a dead serious look.
Heather, another co-worker, always had a smile on when she worked, even when she was stressed out and had an exam the next morning. Somehow, being at the snack bar transformed her. Noting down her experience, she wrote a new employee handbook for the snack bar.
Heather, Tony and a few other employees asked me to drive them to Stop and Shop during the storms this past March to buy bread, since we had run out the night before. They dug my car out of the purple parking lot and we drove slowly, in the middle of the storm, to get the big cardboard boxes full of warm buns. Few employees ever love their workplace and their customers enough to do that.
As financial organizations, the eight student-run enterprises on-campus are disastrous: I have had to beg, coax and threaten bookkeepers to get reports done on time. My work was a nightmare. By the time I got to the income statement, I was so confused that I didn't even have a clue whether we made or lost money. I still shrivel when I remember my mistakes.
I'd lie if I'd say that the student businesses were the only good thing that happened to me at UMass. I could have written about a myriad of defining experiences: the tight-knit Jewish community I spent a good part of my time involved with, writing for the Collegian, international dorm living, an unforgettable semester abroad in Mexico.
But somehow, the student businesses sticks out in my mind as a shining symbol of UMass, for good or bad: their warm sense of community, their pseudo-hippie culture, the hyper-energy of their young people, the tired bureaucratic institution that bogs them down.
I had made real friendships at the student businesses between my meetings with purchasing committees and planning boards. Some of those friendships involved my co-workers lending me sixty bucks and helping me get my car from Amherst Towing, after I illegally parked at the Campus Center numerous times on Friday afternoons. Others changed my life.
When the chancellor congratulated us for another good year at the annual student businesses dinner last week, he exclaimed how he was 'basking in the reflected glory' of the student businesses. Although Tony couldn't be there and Heather didn't get to speak on the stage, I thought about them. For a moment, my throat became stuffy.
It is people like Tony, Heather and Katja - the director of the CSB - who carried me through my insane yet strangely addicting part-time job at UMass. They loved me and my work unconditionally, for all its faults.
They taught and inspired me to be the best at what I want to do. Which is, after all, why I was at UMass in the first place.
They are the unsung heroes of that dinner, and of the student businesses, and of my short years at UMass.
That's why I think the best damn subs in the world are made at Sylvan Snack Bar, under the walls where past employees graffitied their signatures.
Maybe, after all, the snack bar was never really about the subs.
Natty Yagudin was a Collegian Columnist.
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