Alain M. Lafon

Due to “current events” in in-house restaurant “the headquarters“, I felt an obligation to write a little something and send it to the responsible people. For those of you who won’t be able to read the German text, let me sum up what’s in it.

Normally, I am very satisfied with service and quality of “the headquarters”. They offer a great lot of different, rich and tasty foods - they even include a vegetarian section and while they are offering plenty of salads, at least some of them are not marked as containing animals. But yesterday in combination with today changed my mind, because I bought my share of salad which was not labeled as containing meat - and today I even bought something from the dedicated vegetarian area and found bacon therein while eating it.

Well, the non-labeled salad I could live with - everyone does mistakes once in a while. But offering fake vegetarian food is something I do not fancy too much. My opinion is that if somebody labels something as dedicated vegetarian, they have to stick to this requirement. I understand that we are responsible only for a small amount of the overall turnover, but if they can’t keep up with their quality assurance, it would be better not to label anything as vegetarian, because I could and would ask the chef myself if the ingredients are not obvious.

Because I believe in free information and informing the public about misinformation, I am posting my letter as open letter. It is not, because I want to harm the company - as I said before: I liked the location so far.

But as much as I believe in the economic rights of a company not wanting to be blamed for “tiny mistakes”, my believe in the rights of each and every animal exceeds those by far - and as much as it’s worth, I raise my voice in this matter openly.

Thank you for reading.

Update: Only 1.5h after sending my mail to “the headquarters”, I already received an answer. I’m not going to publish it here, because I think it would violate the privacy rights of the writer. But what I can say is that I am very pleased with how they responded - the answer is very detailed and written using friendly wording.

The answer is directly from the manager in charge who took the blame on herself - normally she would be the one to control each salad for ingredients and change the labels if needed. She said she was very sorry and wanted to improve on her performance. As far as I remember there were lots more people yesterday in the restaurant than normally - so maybe it was a very stressfull day for everyone working there and mistakes will happen in such an environment. At least I have learned that not the cooks write the labels themselves, which I find peculiar and interesting and leads me to the conclusion that I will doublecheck for myself in the future.
Concerning lunch today, there has been a mistake by the guys doing the replenishment. They also offerend “Quiche Lorraine” which is incredibly similar to a Swiss “Kaesewaehe” - and they missed up on the opportunity to declare the optically not distinguishable product which might also have caused the person refilling some trouble.

Finally I received an invitation for coffee if I have any further suggestions or feedback. Lucky me that I already have access to great and free coffee in the bureau - or else I would have to think of something now.

She probably did the best job possible to comfort me while also referring to the importance of my mail as well as their will to further improve their service. As I thought the mistakes were only human error which can and will happen. But still - these kind of errors result in harm that I cannot dismiss that easily.

Just couldn’t resist. I saw them, I needed them. All!

Actually I only went shopping after lunch, because the former CD-case ice scraper of my dear friend Falko just wasn’t up to the job of repeatedly removing the Arctic Swiss nights remainder from his car and he wanted to buy a new one. Accidentally Migros isn’t the place to go for such needs, but the time spent wasn’t in vain after all.

While standing in line on the cashpoint, I realized that my former habits of buying gum wouldn’t concur with my habitual habitual consumption thereof.

For your better understanding I included all needed information in a gum-flow-chart:

Not to forget the decadence-factor: Swiss prices(25CHF for gum)

Update: a co-worker and friend of mine wrote a spontaneous nice poem using all colorful flavors of Skai gum and gave me permission to publish it here. What I really like most about is that I just recently learned about the stylistic device Homeoteleuton - and she’s using it all the time. Incredible.

"Spearmint, coolmint or peppermint could all be a hint..
the detail might be found in the Fruit cocktail,
cinnamon is too common,
and if you feel like a bird
you might want to roost with the air boost,
let's chew Fantastic Berry and Cherry
and we will feel merry:-)"

Lately I have come to realize that a great many people are very different than me in somewhat fundamental ways. There are people who claim they cannot and will not understand that there is another person whose primary goal in life is to comfort them, to make them feel special and needed. They say it is imperative to have greater goals in life than only a decent partnership, which is grossly unsophisticated and simply not enough.

How can one say they don’t want their special someone to be happy just because they are together? I’m inclined to say that I am sorry for these people, because I believe that they lack self-assurance, but that would be really patronising - and maybe I’m just plain wrong, so I won’t say it. Still, I say it is the small things that make the world a nice and warm place to be and that this new-age “I have to grow beyond my biological programming” only leads to a lack thereof and therefore to loneliness. I don’t deny that I myself am trying to be leave an impact - I try to be honest, decent and helpful to someone in need. But of uttermost importance is the fact that I know that I am just a man; and therefore will not change the world entirely(at least most likely not), but what a man can do is give himself in - to a relationship - and make it work by investing his resources in what is most dear to him.

Besides, I find it ignorant and selfish to claim one of the greatest goals like world peace, world hunger and alike for oneself, because the only effect that is established is a metaphysical and transcendental touch on the person claiming it - probably without being or behaving any different than us normal dull and unsophisticated people. All it does in reality is help them distinguish themselves in their own minds from the crowd - and they need this feeling, because they want to be special and don’t want to be hurt; not by others - and not by their own psyche.

This week I have written my first Excel sheet ever - and I think I don’t lie when I say “ever ever”. As a person dedicated to computers, there’s always a guy who will come up to me and ask some question concerning Office - and my answer has throughout been: “I’m into computer science, I don’t do Office.”

Well, now that my career has changed and I’m not working for Sun anymore(where I already had to change my opinion a little since I had to publicise OpenOffice), but am into programming business applications - dealing with Office(MS Office in particular*choke*) has become day-to-day action.

Working only 70%, I am the only employee who is allowed to write down hours. My choice was to use a fancy Web2.0 tool which most certainly would make my life more productive while at the same time easier, but ultimately I chose to use Excel for practice. And even though I could fall back upon my large repertoire of Excel functions(i.e. SUM and ROUND), I also had to get help finding a way on how to count lines that are already used.

Luckily my improvisation skills were great enough to do the perfect job: I can write down my hours and my breaks and it automagically calculates how many days I have left in overtime. I even agreed with my inner conscience that Microsoft Office was lame - so I chose to not only use a proprietary application, but also a personality(and therefore life-)threatening tool called Google-Docs for the sake of ubiquitous information. No One can hold me responsible for not being able to remember my current overtime whilst I have the need to know it each and every second of my life. Well, I could have used OpenOffice and my FTP server, but who really wants to be a good and intelligent person in this messy world, anyway? It would have taken me like what.. minutes.. to do the same job with free tools - never mind, I’m a busy man now.

And now comes the funny part. I realized I had to improve on my work-reward-expectations that I had grown into begin a lowly student(I’m talking of things like having to work all day without ever[ever] getting a reward whatsoever) - in my first 15 days, I already worked enough to earn me over 7 free days in overtime.

Yesterday my life finally made a turn - even if in silence, but I want to stay focused on what matters right now. I received the first paycheck working as application programmer. It looked pretty neat, but just didn’t feel how I wanted the experience to feel.

I began raising my own money with 15 - whilst being completely abandoned from my parents before I even was born since the age of 18. And even though I didn’t get any nameable help from any social institution and had few to back me up, I always had my own apartment, but lived far below what Germany considers minimal standard of living. In the struggle, I didn’t miss too many opportunities to screw things up - my CV looks kinda awkward, which lead to a few unpleasant incidents, while my social life has been so screwed, I can’t even tell without writing a series of novels about it.

Now, there I am, finally earning 4k CHF a month net. Still a student, still trying to do his best, still having to deal with my screwed history. I thought yesterday could finally be a turning point, but the punch in the stomach I received just a couple of minutes ago proved otherwise. I won’t write about it, because it hurts too much - if I could instantly forget it, I wouldn’t hesitate. Putting it into text would certainly prove to be a stupid idea.

I have to change my way of living, of dealing with my needs and those of others. I have to stick to top priorities and stop taking big chances; history showed me they don’t pay off - and it really doesn’t matter how much I want them to do just that. There is only one life I can live at the moment; it is precious and fragile - I want it to be good, it will be good I say.

Finally I have the ressources to impose change and if I don’t do it now, I will some time die an old and inwardly discontent man like so many before me.

What is this post about? Switzerland of course! The country of love, peace and infinite possibilities! I am glad that I can be here, I am thankful and I want to make this time worthwhile. Thanks for reading, visitor. I appreciate it.

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