Twelve Years of Service: A Cashier's Life Merges with Student Life

Randa Deeb

In today's capitalist world driven by cutthroat competition, one hardly expects to come across workers or employees who are ready to sacrifice being promoted for continual contact with even the friendliest of customers. This is precisely the case with Randa Deeb, the Ada Dodge Cafeteria employee who has preferred to remain a cashier and be in daily contact with students throughout the twelve long years she has served the University community, rather than get promoted to a higher, better paying position and risk losing that contact.

"Serving students is more rejuvenating than you can imagine," says Deeb, who was recruited for the job in 1994 after working in several firms as an accountant. "Age takes a standstill when working with students," she remarks, explaining that she has gradually come to identify with students and their concerns, becoming their audience and offering them counsel and prayers, especially during reading periods, final exams, and the all-important election days when candidates and voters alike rush to the cafeteria for hot drinks to calm frayed nerves.

Deeb, a fish hunter, swimmer, and connoisseur of Nizar Qabbani's poetry, proudly outlines major events that have made her career rewarding. Many AUB alumni, some of them married with children, fondly remember Deeb as a warm employee and a friendly listener; they keep returning to the cafeteria to express their gratitude and to have lunch with their families. Despite the occasional minor tiffs with coworkers, Deeb is generally on good terms with everyone on the cafeteria team. Indeed, her cordial attitude with colleagues and her irreproachable treatment of students earned her the coveted complimentary title of Employee of the Month for September 2006 from the cafeteria privateer, the USM Compass Company.

Randa Deeb staunchly occupied her cashier's seat at the familiar upper end of the cafeteria even during the most harrowing days witnessed by the University. She especially recalls the horror on students' faces the day former Prime Minister Hariri was assassinated and her own feeling of helplessness in face of the tragedy. "Students, trapped in AUB, clustered around the cafeteria's large television screen and came up to me asking for news I did not have," she says. Even on the most brutal days of shelling in the last Israeli war on Lebanon, Deeb kept reporting to work daily. Her unerring presence imparted some sense of stability to the handful of students who remained behind and who could still expect the same unchanging motherly smile behind an otherwise deserted counter.