It was green, it was fresh, but it certainly wasn’t supposed to be in her salad.

It was a year ago that sophomore aerospace engineering major Christina Constantinides found a green inch worm in her Saladsational at The North Campus Diner.

“I started to eat it and looked down, and it was a worm,” she said. “If I hadn’t looked down, I would have just eaten it.”

After a friend urged her, Constantinides took her salad to a manager who “apologized a lot” and offered her a free lunch, she said. Constantinides never took the manager up on the offer, though. Thinking it would be too much trouble to get hold of the manager who would authorize the free meal, she never redeemed it.

Besides, she didn’t think it was a big deal. “I feel like that could happen to a lot of different kinds of food. Maybe it was just really fresh lettuce?”

Instead, she posted her story on the new Facebook group “Tired of North Campus Dining.”

Sophomore computer science major Martin Folkoff created the Facebook group last Sunday when he realized just how rampant Diner dissatisfaction was.

“One hundred people joined the first day, 100 the second day … over the weekend not many people joined,” Folkoff said, adding that many of the members are random North Campus students he doesn’t know.

But Dining Services is planning a cyberspace counter-move.

Dining Services spokesman Bart Hipple said he hopes Dining Services will soon tap into the Facebook grumblings to get a better idea of where to focus their improvements.

“Facebook is the way people are communicating, so if it’s easy for someone to comment on Facebook, I want to get that comment,” he said.

Hipple said Dining Services may create a Facebook profile, advertise events to alert “friends” to dining specials and a Facebook group where students can post their views. “No reprisals ever for comments,” he said.

What perplexes Hipple, who admitted to being a little behind the times when it comes to technology, is that students complain online but won’t turn in paper comment cards in the dining halls.

Folkoff said he has never filled out a comment card or formally complained to Dining Services.

“I feel like one person’s idea on The Diner is not really adequate to bring about any sort of change. When over 400 people think that the meals and service are dissatisfactory, it means a lot more,” he said.

Hipple said Dining Services receives about three to four comment cards a week – online and on paper.

“I’m not really sure how, other than klieg lights and neon lights, to make them obvious. We try and have [comment boxes] at the exits.

“Everybody’s concerned in the sense that here are comments that we’re not getting,” Hipple said, adding that “their feedback would be much more useful if they’d give it to us.”

But for now, students seem to prefer ranting amongst themselves.

In a discussion board entitled “Horror Stories from the Lunch Line,” students blasted Dining Services with accusations of gross things ending up in the food, poor customer service and worse.

Sophomore history major Nick Dudas posted what his roommate overheard the sushi chefs saying in Korean: “One said, ‘This fish stinks, it has gone bad!’ to which the other responded, ‘Shut up and cut it up anyway, just hurry.'”

Another student wrote, “I remember the very first time I went to the grill I got a big thick black hair in my [quesadilla]. So that wasn’t a great first experience.”

Hipple said he could not verify these stories, but he maintained that Dining Services had not committed any health code violations. He said the sushi chefs are not Dining Services employees but he knows they keep the fish refrigerated. He said the lettuce comes triple-washed and bagged but dining hall employees wash it again anyway before serving it.

While Hipple said he wanted to be a part of these online discussions to find out what else has gone wrong, he admitted he will need some help.

“I invite anyone who can teach me about Facebook to teach me about it,” he said, acknowledging that students rely on Facebook much more heavily than they do older forms of online communication, namely the comment section of the Dining Services website .

“I don’t know how to reach out to all those fragmented users, how to respond to this in the new age,” Hipple said.

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