Students aren't the only members of the Harvard community with interesting extracurricular activities.

One Harvard Dining Services (HDS) administrator says he spends between one and five hours a week speaking to students anonymously over the phone. But this administrator doesn't breathe heavily. He only raves about spicy corkscrew fries.

Each morning before breakfast this administrator--commonly known as the "Menu Man"--updates the culinary recordings in the peculiar inflected voice that undergraduates have come to count on to warn them of the day's dining hall fare.

"I originated the whole thing with an AT&T answering machine...four years ago," Menu Man said in a telephone interview yesterday, which was also Menu Man Appreciation Day.

"I used to work the nightshift," the familiar voice from 5-5700 says. "We were busy working and trying to serve the meal and the phones were ringing. The students wanted to know what was for dinner."

HDS workers would resort to taking the telephone off of its receiver because they were not able to handle the incoming calls, Menu Man says. "This was very non-productive."

So the HDS innovator who has become a personal friend to undergraduates from Mather House to the Quad asked his manager if he could set up an answering machine to respond to the requests.

Two years later, Menu Man discovered the wonders of voice mail and set up the full range of options that serves undergraduates today, although most students have never tested the limits to that range.

"A little trick is this," he says. "Looking at the keyboard, number 4 makes my voice go slower, number 6 makes my voice go faster, number 7 makes my voice go softer, number 9 louder and number 2 is a pause."

"But I'd prefer hearing my voice on 6 because I get sick of hearing my voice on the machine all of the time," he adds.

Menu Man, who refuses to divulge his identity, says he is "just someone who has worked here for too many years."

"I'm in the administrative capacity," he says. "I'm someone that students see every day. There are a couple of students who do know who I am. But who I am isn't as important as the message that I give."

Menu Man says that few members of the HDS staff know his secret identity. "I usually choose to do it whenever no one is around," he says of his clandestine activity.

Menu Man says he is about 40 years old, and was born in California's San Fernando Valley. "I was in the service," he says. "I was stationed here and I've been with Harvard over 15 years."

He says that the 20,000 calls he receives each month from students range from the brutally critical to the truly disturbing.