Alain M. Lafon

Time is drawing nearer by the day; I should better hurry and secure me my dream mansion to live in. Unfortunately I’m lacking a major component for seeking one of those – time. Last week I bookmarked close to two dozen apartments, but just about each night I couldn’t go and attend visiting hours, because I had to work late. Friday then(and I may say this was yet another Friday night), I left the bureau well after 10PM, had dinner and a beer with a co-worker and was home just before midnight when others were about to enjoy their party habits. But how could I leave early while there was this sinking ship customer having decent trouble.

Only one day I was able to leave early. And so I planned it well. My first stop of the afternoon was to fetch my so called “Betreibungsauszug” attesting me to have no  debts; and guess what – it seems I have none they know of. Getting this one was rather easy since bureaucracy seems to work really smoothly; no overhead, no long waiting in lines, no unfriendly clerks, no over-complication leading to any trouble so far.

Then the real work began; I drove off to what I refused to believe it might exist in this beautiful city – a real ghetto with everything needed to feel uncomfortable: all those pseudo gangstas(please notice my fluent subcultural influences) in their pimped cars listening to crap, drunk migrant kids seeking for trouble, a lot of broken glass on the street to take my eyes of walls full of graffiti calling me names. Well, with all that filth I might have lived with – despite the fact that I would have had to arm myself in the future, but the apartment waiting for me was beyond all legally possible description. I will skip this part, because it probably would seem that I’m a vicious Nazi talking bad about friendly people just happening to originate from foreign cultures – only because I had the pleasure to find a flophouse full of terribly disgusting people – leaving me itches in the nasty places. Supposedly I should only contemplate to write a decent letter to the landlord, because I consider it frivolous impudence to put up with visiting hours while the only ways inside the apartment are those the rats have broken free for the sake of having flight tunnels when the nasty vermin wake up at night. Well, considering my spare time on the other hand; this might never happen.

On the other hand, the second apartment I saw was nothing but magnificent. Proclaiming the same matter of expense as “Exhibit A” for a future investigation on how cockroaches can engulf an entire human being if only the breeding habitat is set up properly, the apartment just fulfilled all my dreams – including being close to work, brightly and quiet. There were even bonuses like the Coop just around the corner having opening hours until 11PM even on Saturdays, the tram station being nearby or friendly, tidy and fluent previous tenants from the beautiful country of Liechtenstein. Oh man, I wish I could live there!

Of course I wanted to take action and introduce myself personally at the estate agency – probably to even leave a good impression there. But what shall I say, some client of us thought better of my plans and started to post some invoices not once, but multiple times… Thinking of the amounts being well in the high 6-figure ranges, I wonder what manual signatures are for (if our system fails due to the clients’ lack of supporting infrastructur that can handle the SQL traffic). No matter what, I had my fair share of quick-fixes work to do and stayed until some time around 11PM which probably only was 6 hours after the real estate guys went home and on with their personal lives. Considering that today(Monday) there might also have been a last minute opening for a private investigation on whether I could smuggle myself into my dreams, it might have been a good idea to stay less than 14 hours in the bureau one might think. Well, what can I say..

Don’t wonder if my address will slightly change and soon will be “Bridgestreet 24” – somewhere more close to the bureau – then I could finally leave all this logistical overhead behind and walk myself to work each day.

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Update: Today I received a call from the real estate agency. As it turns out they made an excessive background-check on me – calling earlier  landlords and my employer who each took the liberty of recommending me – probably only because they know what I sound like when I’m really grumpy, but still, I’m very glad they all stood up for me, because on Friday morning my life will take the next turn and become even greater than now: I will be signing the contract for the mentioned apartment of my dreams*yay* As it seems “week #1” might be the last week for the next decade to come*phew*

tonight, around 00:05AM, I came to realize that there might be a resource conflict coming up – I was still sitting in the bureau; not quite finished yet, but catching the last train on the other hand had a pretty exciting touch to it as well. So I left early.
Coming home, I powered down my iPod at the entrance and was instantly greeted by that kind of Deathmetal that let’s you fear the wrath of all norsk gods at once. Walking into the house was like entering a near perfect chaos – the sonic disturbance somehow disarranged just about everything in the kitchen and living room. Where there once has been a table waiting in availability for someone to see fit and share a plate for a decent meal, there were only beer cans, vodka bottles and the remainder of several cigarette boxes.
Since my evening was spoiled concerning matters of any reasonable socialisation due to the advanced time of day and my recent lack of listening to my ears bleeding their way to Tinnitus, I joined in for a cheese sandwich, a beer and a couple of songs all sounding like “Death in Fire” before going back to my nerdy compelling life and some episodes of “The Big Bang Theory” before falling asleep dropping dead for at least 4 hours prior to going back to work.

Annotation: Recently I kinda struggled with the problem on how to nourish myself effectively while not getting broke at the same time. The day before yesterday for example, I spent 40CHF on lunch and dinner alone. Yesterday on the other hand, I probably solved the matter completely in buying a trail mix which got me from lunch at 12PM until 00:00AM without any hassle at all – I even felt more awake and open to productive thinking. And for final reasoning, a trail mix even conforms to Fruitarian lifestyle which is a definite plus(not implying that I can live up to this standard in any mentionable way). Further testing is definitely needed.

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.