In the Serengeti, if you dawdle too long at the watering hole, you’ll get eaten by a lion. So imagine my frustration when I find myself stuck in a group waiting in an interminable never-ending wait for our most precious hallway resource: the water fountain.

It was about a minute before the bell to start class was expected to ring when, with my head pounding, I headed for the water fountain for a splash of hydration. Eight glasses a day makes the headaches go away.

Except no. Huddled around the one remaining functioning water fountain, like wildebeests surrounding a pool of agua, is a whole army of people. And I’m stuck behind some slowpoke filling up a water bottle.

Water fountain-hogging is a simple case of bad manners: it takes nearly two minutes to fill up one of those jumbo-sized bottles but it takes about two seconds to drink a sip of water. By the time a person fills up their jumbo jug, dozens of people would have been able to have a sip from the fountain.

There’s a couple of easy ways to solve this. You could fill up your water bottle before school and wait to refill it during lunch. Unless you’re chugging water like a zebra with chronic dehydration, you probably won’t go through more than two bottles a day.

But let’s suppose you really can’t wait for the respite of fifth or sixth period. Then, I propose, you could then seek out one of the two or three locations around the school in which there are two or more functioning fountains and take the short one. That way, there’s always a functioning one for us straight-from-the-stream drinkers.

But even in the rarest cases where you can’t inconvenience yourself even a little, just follow this one word-advice: yield. If there’s a person behind you and you’re less than 10 seconds from finishing, just let them cut in front of you. It’ll delay you a couple of seconds but it’s the right thing to do.

Just remember: one’s right to fill a water bottle shouldn’t interfere with everyone else’s right to get a drink. It’s worth that little extra effort to be a little more polite. Remember the first line of the zebra code: friends don’t let friends get eaten by lions.