Imagine you’re a freshman entering Stav for dinner during your first full week of classes. You can’t remember the name of one of the people joining your group for dinner, you accidentally called your advisor “Mom” this morning, and you’re putting off your first load of college laundry because you’ve only heard horror stories — or you’ve never done your own laundry before. Either way, you manage to get food on your plate and in your stomach without any major mishaps. You even have good conversations with the people at your table: your roommate, someone they met in class last week, the people who live across the hall from you, and someone from your SOAR group. Feeling emboldened and ready to face the dingy laundry room, you stand up from the table and begin your descent down the Stav stairs. You’ve even mastered the art of putting your cup and cutlery on your plate before you get to the dish return to make the process smoother.

Then, it happens. Some invisible force acts upon your cup, and it launches off the side of your plate. Time slows as you watch it clatter step-by-step down the staircase. The vaulted ceilings somehow amplify the sound it makes while it tumbles — almost as if you’re in an echoey cave and not a dining hall that looks a bit like Hogwarts’ Great Hall. It’s all you can do to follow sheepishly behind your cup, rushing to stop its cacophony would only put you at risk of propelling some other piece of kitchenware down the stairs.

As if dropping your cup down a set of stairs in front of your new friends wasn’t enough, the very moment it stops rolling, someone in the sea of eating students starts clapping. Another person joins, and then another. Until seemingly every student in the dining hall is clapping. The applause couldn’t possibly be for you, could it?

You know how professors sometimes put content on a study guide that’s harder than what they’ll actually test you on, so you’re more prepared than you need to be? It doesn’t always work out, but that’s a conversation for a different article. The point is, we don’t need life at St. Olaf to be harder than life beyond the Hill. When someone drops something in public, outside of the microcosm of Stav Hall, people don’t clap. Because it’s odd. More than that, it’s embarrassing.

We are a campus of students who will spend the extra energy to hold the door open for the person behind them, yet we mock people for dropping cups, forks, and spoons. Are we so intent on perfection that the smallest slip-up yields public humiliation? Every Ole is juggling three commitments too many. From where I sit, there’s simply no need for Stav applause to remain a pillar of our community.