Where Have all the Blue Crayons Gone?

As I near the end of my fifth summer waiting tables at a family-friendly (perhaps overly kid-friendly) neighborhood restaurant, I find myself pondering the crayon situation. Like many restaurants, we provide paper place mats and a four-pack of Crayolas to the under-twelve crowd, a feeble attempt to keep the kids entertained and in their seats in an age where fewer and fewer parents feel responsible for doing this themselves. In recent years, we've made an effort to reuse the crayons we hand out, tossing the unbroken colored wax sticks into little pails, which we loan out and then recollect at the end of each table's meal.

Despite these Crayola conservation efforts, we still lose a fair amount of crayons to the everyday wear and tear of restaurant life. Crayons that have been broken, chewed on, ground into the carpet, or melted under a hot plate or an extended stay on the patio are removed from the rotation and tossed out.

What baffles me, though, is how we always seem to have a shortage of blue crayons. No matter how many times we stock the little pails with fresh crayons, filling each with an equal number of colors, the blue crayons are always the first to disappear. Are blue crayons more susceptible to breaking? Are they used more often than the other colors? Is there a demand for blue crayons on the juvenile black market?

Whatever the reason, all I know is that once the blue crayons are gone, the red and the green aren't far behind. Which leaves us with-- you guessed it-- pails full of yellow crayons. And no kid wants a bucket full of yellow crayons. This is why I've taken it upon myself to oversee the regular stocking of the crayon pails, because there's nothing worse than having a section full of children and a wait list half a page deep and being taken to task by a four-year old because they don't want to color the sky yellow. Not that I blame them, but still.

So in the interest of crayon equality, I encourage children everywhere to use all of the colors equally. Their world will be brighter because of it, and not so blue.