By Chin Poh Nee

Imagine this – you are at the cafeteria during peak hours. The place is packed, and you’re trying to look for an empty table to sit at. Finally a group of students leave a table, and you have a place to sit. You put your bag down only to realize that the table is cluttered with plates used by the said group of students. Hungry and impatient, you have to clear the table yourself by carrying other’s dirty plates to put them in the designated basin.

Does the situation sound overly familiar?

I am sure that this is a problem faced by every student. It is bad enough that you have to “fight” for places to eat at, but now you also have to clear other people’s dirty dishes.

What I find utterly amusing is that even though people get exasperated at cleaning up after another, they still do the same thing – not putting their dirty dishes inside the basins provided.

At this point of time, the saying ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you’ comes to mind. However, I think UTAR’s student’s mindset is ‘do it because everyone else is doing it anyway’.

Honestly, it doesn’t take that much of an effort to just get up from your seat and put your dirty dishes at the basin. In fact, now there are even staffs from the cafeteria’s stalls who go around collecting the dirty dishes. I applaud this act, but I think that doing this will just pamper the students.

Do you remember, back in primary and secondary school we had duty rosters in classes appointing each student to a different cleaning task? Apparently, this is to “instill a sense of cleanliness in ourselves”. We also had to pay direly if we were caught littering on school grounds. Of course, the hidden reason could just be that the school authorities were too lazy to employ people to clean up.

But my point isn’t that. My point is, the teachers always gave the students the same reasoning – if you don’t litter at home, what gives you the reason to litter in school?

The same applies here – would you leave dirty plates lying around in your own house after you’re done eating? No?

I rest my case.