Room Cleaning, Now Silverware;--Anything Else?

They said that rooms in the Houses would be vacuumed only every other week because of a labor shortage. Then they said that freshman rooms wouldn't be cleaned at all. What next?

Silverware.

As residents of the five Houses affiliated with the central kitchens already know, the powers-that-be have devised a new disposal system for dirty silverware.

Diners in Eliot, Winthrop, Kirkland, Lowell, and Leverett must sort out their silverware by knives, forks and spoons and deposit them in appropriate bins.

What most of them don't know is that the bins contain a potent pre-soaped solution designed to soak off sticky food particles that would otherwise become encrusted during the dishwashing process.

"You get much cleaner silverware," William Eckles, manager of the college dining halls, said yesterday.

Not Mandatory

Eckles emphasized that it was not mandatory for students to sort out their silverware but conceded that most do so when confronted by the three separate disposal bins.

And just like the head of the student porter service last week, Eckles said that a labor shortage was at least a secondary cause of the new system. He said that the war and its higher draft calls are reducing the amount of non-student labor which used to man the college dishwashing rooms.

The problem of congestion around the sorting areas will be solved, Eckles said, when the rest of the Houses cut silverware slots into the walls to the dishroom as Lowell has done. He said that the slots will be completed in Eliot House by the end of next week.

One Big Bin

Houses not connected with the central kitchen will probably retain the luxury of unsorted silver. Quincy and Dunster do not plan any changes at the present moment. Their diners merely throw their silverware en masse into a single bin.

But a spokesman for Adams -- where diners currently hurl their tray, silverware and napkins through a slot in one motion -- said that he thought Adams would eventually institute such a system.

The Freshman Union is part of the central kitchens but freshman silverware is sorted into the pre-soaped bins by the workers at the other end of the Union's moving disposal ramp.

Meanwhile, the new system has spawned the practice of flipping at the end of a meal to see which man carries back all the forks, and which man carries back the spoons. The winner presumably drops the collected napkins and ice cream wrappers in the big barrel.