Chambers Cafeteria is a place for students to eat and socialize with friends on campus. For the staff of the cafeteria, Chambers offers a friendly work environment and a chance to talk with the students.

One student, however, sees life in the cafeteria from behind the glass while working the second shift of cafeteria workers.

Joshua Gist is one of the many students who work at the cafeteria, and the 23-year-old freshman finds himself juggling many weekly tasks, as he is taking 17 hours as an international studies major, working 24 hours at Chambers, and spending two hours tutoring international students. Gist began working at Chambers when he enrolled as a student at Tech, and has been there for almost a year. He is known on campus as “The Stir-Fry Guy,” which is the best summation of his job description – manning the stir fry.

“I have people that stop me on the way to class and say ‘you’re the stir fry guy!’” Gist said. Despite how busy he is, Gist enjoys working at Chambers.

“I absolutely love working there. I get to talk to kids that aren’t in my classes,” he said. “Basically, I get 35-40 seconds with 300 kids a day, and I love that because I love working with people, and this lets me combine my enjoyment  of food with my enjoyment of people.”  Gist graduated from Dardanelle High School in 2002 and after graduating, he bounced around from Oklahoma to San Diego, then to Michigan, New Zealand and Australia. The experience took acombined three years.

“It was amazing,” Gist said. “It was eye-opening to get out of Arkansas and see different cultures. It gives you a whole new approach for where you live when you come back.”

In his off time, he is an avid video gamer, a martial artist, an English tutor, a Dungeons and Dragons gamer, and he enjoys reading. N e g a t i v e criticism of the cafeteria annoys him, he said.

“I think if people want to write something bad about the cafeteria, they should do good research before hand,” he says.

He cited the criticism of not having another swipe line to alleviate the long line to get into the cafeteria.

“There were people talking about putting in two swipe lines, and you can put in nine swipe lines and get people in here quickly, but they bottleneck at the place where you get your tray,” he said. “We can’t serve everyone at once, so that gets on my nerves.”

“I think if people want to say bad things about Chambers, they should work one day here,” he continued. “And I don’t mean a fluff job, I mean actually doing work here. [Thursday night], we had 730 students come through here in two hours, and that was a slow night. So I don’t think people really know how many people come in here, and how tough it is on us.”