It is a truth universally acknowledged that college students are busy.

Sometimes, we get leeway for that. For example, it’s acceptable to go to class in sweatpants sometimes after an all-nighter or to quietly eat your lunch in the back of class because you don’t get a break to eat.

However, we never have an excuse to completely disregard our surroundings – specifically, the people in our surroundings.

Service workers at Loyola allow us a lot of the freedom we enjoy in college. When we need a meal or a snack after an all-nighter or caffeine before another all-nighter, Sodexo employees are always present, accepting Wolfbucks and cordially serving stressed students.

For those of us who live in dorms, we never need to make emergency Home Depot runs in the middle of the night to fix our showers – we just call Physical Plant to make our repairs.

Any of us who have tried to use a Biever bathroom on a Sunday night realize just how important WFF is to us, our sanity and our personal hygiene.

College is supposed to serve as a transition into adulthood. However, this does not allow us to do whatever we want or to blatantly disregard people around us.

You need to take care of your surroundings. If you’re not cleaning up the mess you make, someone else is, and – as we all know – that’s not a pleasant experience.

Loyola service workers are worthy of dignity and respect.

We’ve all seen people fail to treat service workers with respect: people on their cell phones while checking out at the C-Store, people complaining about service workers in front of service workers or people refusing to acknowledge the service workers around them.

Even though service workers are not in your peer group, they are humans and have many of the life experiences you do.

Treat the people around you with kindness. Kindness helps more than an individual’s emotional state. Time magazine reports on a study that states that giving and receiving kindness improves personal health.

When service workers ask how you are, respond. Better yet, ask them how they’re doing. Talk to them – a lot of them have really good stories. Smile at them – a smile goes a long way.

Respect toward service workers should not stop at Loyola. We need to remember how important our service workers are, no matter where we are. We would not be able to function without them.

So, the next time you’re waiting in line to check out at the C-Store and going over your endless to-do list in your head, take some time to greet whoever is checking out your purchases and be thankful that traveling farther away for a snack is one less thing you have to worry about.