Pontificating on Meal Vouchers

In my wallet, I have nearly $50 bucks of on-campus meal vouchers. One of the perks of paying $40,000 for the Working Professional UF MBA is that an $8.99 meal voucher is waiting for you when you arrive to Gainesville every month. I just love getting to class, seeing a pile of small envelopes - each with one of our names - and fishing through to find my vouchers. Additionally, if there were one or two envelopes of vouchers still hanging around by 11:00am, I'd take 'em. Nah, I wouldn't take them, I'd pressure other people to take them. Nah - I wouldn't pressure other people to take them, I'd just dream about taking them, think about it for a long while, then finally decide to take them. I'd walk over to the empty pile and realize someone else already took them. Ugh - I need to get better at life.

Saving up meal vouchers is the natural progression of life in the Working Professional UF MBA program. In the beginning, it's like, "Schweeet! Free meal." You can go to the on-campus Starbucks and grab a dried-out sandwich, or head over to Panda Express to fill your stomach with gourmet sodium. 

But as you get sick of walking over to a cafeteria or a cafeteria-of-chain-fast-food-restaurants, you long for something more succulant. Something fresh and amazing, perhaps a place where you're herded like cows through a rat race of who-can-mak-a-burrito-faster. Chipotle filled this void and was right next to the business school. Other, better places were Burrito Brothers (sweet potato burrito is unreal) or Bistro 1245 (grilled three-cheese and butternut squash soup is to die for), but right next to Hough Hall.

So, instead of using our $8.99 vouchers - our "free" money to satisfy our tummies - many of us went out and spent $10 bucks of our own cash on something more fulfilling. When I taste the warmth of that butternut squash soup on a cool, Sunday afternoon in January after having sat through four hours of lecture, I get renewed... and fatter (pretty sure the only ingredient in that soup is cream).

This spending behavior left many of us with extra meal tickets, or shall I say Starbucks SWAG tickets. We quickly found out we could use these vouchers for whatever goodies Starbucks had to offer. I now have mugs I don't need, I've bought more Kind bars than I know what to do with, and I've chewed on $2 sleeves of cashews that are perfect for my drive back to St. Augustine. 

Now, even despite having purchased all of these little Starbucks goodies, I have $50 bucks. What to do what to do.