Most Central High students didn’t know what hit them when one Monday morning they arrived to find that all the vending machines were gone. Curiously, local traffic cops started ticketing the food vendors’ wagons for minor traffic offences that had always been overlooked in the past. The vendors’ visits became brief, furtive, and much less frequent. Shortly afterward, something or other happened to the microwave ovens at the local variety stores. The students assumed that the administration was behind all this: The goal, they told each other, was to make students eat in the school cafeteria, in order to curtail drug dealing (both real and imagined) and smoking (usually real) off premises.
Yes, the goal was indeed to make the students eat in the cafeteria, but the students were hardly prepared for what happened next:
More. A whimsical look at how a bureaucracy can bring about improvements despite itself …