You’re late for class … again. Your schedule only allows for a 10-minute pit stop in the Sidelines Pub before your body starts to eat itself from hunger.

Score! There’s no line and only two people in booths who are already eating!

You may just make it to class in time! But let’s get serious.

By the time you take the 20 steps from the door to the counter, a line has formed from nowhere.

The two people eating are angrily asking what happened to the shakes they ordered three days ago, and it’s only then that you notice the two skeletons in the booth in the corner with a number still on the table.

When you finally get to the front of the line, now at least 15 minutes late for the class AFTER the one you already missed, you order food from an employee who looks like she’d rather do anything in the world than get you what you want.

You say “Mile High Club to go” and the attendant repeats back “One chocolate shake for here.”

Before you can say anything, she is looking daggers at you to get out of the way for the next person in line.

You then begin the arduous process of waiting by the drink machine for whatever you just ordered (whatever it was, it will be somehow wrong).

You decide what you want most in the world, as you age by the counter, is a cool glass of ice water. Yeah, that’s the ticket. Oh no! There are 17 pitchers of ice on the counter. Ice. No water. They are ALWAYS empty. Feeling like someone lost in the desert, you turn hopelessly back to the counter and scratch your beard that has grown since you entered the Pub.

By this time, it is Saturday afternoon and your original class was on Tuesday.

Finally, like an angel, an employee strides godlike over to you, and smiles. And says “Have you been helped yet?”

After you finish tearing every hair out of your head (which takes a long time, but not long enough for your food to come out), you calmly (while throwing a chair at a patron) tell the waiter that your Mile High Club is taking you know, sort of a long time. He says that he’ll bring it right out .

But you’ve heard that before. It was another time when “right out” meant under 10 minutes. That was a time when you could go to movies for a dime, everyone had a middle part in their hair, and Coke came in glass bottles. Not here and not now, though.

When you are just about to give up on living, you hear a half-hearted yell from the other side of the soda machine. “Chocolate shake to go, for (insert name here).”

The injustice of this escapes you because of your hunger, and you accept your shake, probably strawberry anyway and hobble out of the Pub with the help of your walker.

Okay, so maybe I’m exaggerating a little bit, but those of you who have been to the Pub lately know that I’m only exaggerating a little bit.

Seriously, many students depend on the Pub and the Village Commons for food during a school day.

If Sidelines is going to continue to be a DU staple, the least someone could do is make sure people get their food sometime in the same century that they ordered it in. Maybe we could even get the orders right, too.

I don’t want to sound crazy, but we could even try to make it seem like we might not even mind so much getting food for someone who just paid for it.

Maybe I’m just old-fashioned and enjoy getting food on time, but I would be surprised if I was the only student with this complaint.