Alain M. Lafon

These days I find myself most often to be the last guy coming to work – but I would like to think that this somewhat correlates with the circumstance of me being as often a subset of the last people to leave the bureau in the middle of the night later hours of the day. Thinking of my personal matters right now, I should probably start cutting back on hours, find myself a nice flat and take care of some social issues.

Before arriving at my temporary home at 9:30pm yesterday again, I have consolidated about 18 papers full of random to-dos onto only three pages while finding solutions for several of the beforehand penned down problems.

Obsolete by consolidation

Considering I start to look this fucked up when working too many hours, I really have to cut back. But still – this picture is featuring my two new best friends: Jean-Luc(the label is Picard, so there really was no choice of not naming my new companion after the captain of NCC-1701-D) and my headphones(Koss Porta Pro) which both deserve a special feature on gefechtsdienst for the sake of making my life joyous(;

Weary man in near empty tram enjoying his trip home

Annotation:

1. Today I got hold of some information which might concern you, my dear and most precious reader, too. Google found a gap(or if you want to call it void) in the space-time-continuum. You can observe it using Google Street View: NE Summit Dr, Blue Springs, Jackson, Missouri 64014
   

   Gap in the space-time-continuum

2. The day before yesterday Steffipunkt announced in Twitter and on her blog that already being a Vegetarian, she would improve on her Karma in trying to live a vegan lifestyle as of tomorrow(which accidentally already has become yesterday in the meantime..). I was full of joy to have randomly found such a nice post in between all this blabber on the web and then rejoiced when she wrote a new post today in which she summarized her first experiences. Even if it might seem a struggle at first, I wish her all the luck and look forward to be kept posted(;

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.