Just a small quick update regarding our visit to the new O’Learys restaurant the other day.
I mailed the HQ and got a very nice mail back tonight. He apologized very politely and even offered us a free evening off bowling and dinner which was really nice of him. Surprisingly nice. They could just have deleted the mail like most companies would and gotten on with their business but he not only read it but replied. I thought that was nice. Unfortunately me and Helena don’t have the luxury of going out much, we pretty much have to plan logistics one or two weeks ahead of time so when we do go out we want it to be something or someplace special. And it was on Sunday so not very likely to happen again anytime soon and when it happens we’re not likely to go there again. I think. Then again it is free… but as our old spam protection software said, “there is no such thing as a free lunch”…
When I left my job at Vinge my nice colleagues there got together and bought me two gifts. The first was a whisky that was really nice. And the second one was a gift certificate for 1.000 Swedish crowns (approximately $140) at O’Learys. They knew I liked going to O’Learys since I’ve gone there alot ever since my first Formula 1 at O’Learys experience in 1999. The gift certificate was for the newly opened restaurant in the north part of central Stockholm (Norrtull). And as this was the last race of the season, and it started at 5 pm in the afternoon it was a perfect time to use that certificate.
When we got there they made two things clear – alcohol wasn’t covered by the gift certificate and there was no refunds. That seemed Ok to me since we were 5 people I thought we’d eat for 1000 swedish crowns. The food was good (above average for O’Learys actually) but that was about it. They forgot our orders left and right, they never even asked us if we wanted desserts (which we definitely did) and at the end me and my brother Jocke was left waiting for our beers but we got tired of waiting for that so when the race was over and the soccer game was done we just wanted to pay and get out of there.
And this is where basic math skills actually outsmarted my drunken math skills. I’d like to think I got some advanced math skills but after 4 beers not so much. The tab ended up at 1250:- swedish crowns. So I had to tell this waitress that we had a gift certificate we handed in when we got here 3 hours ago so go sort that please. Which she did and came back with two tabs. One for 250:- since the certificate was only for 1000:-. And one tab for the alcohol for 500:-. Which meant we paid 750:- for a tab of 1250:- with a gift certificate of 1000:-. If we hadn’t wanted to get out of there so badly and if I didn’t have 4 beers in my system I would indeed have protested their math skills saying that we really should only pay for the beer since the way they counted we in practice paid for everything but the beer. So they ripped us off of 250:-.
That combined with the lack of service and the fact that I was sober by the time we got home (which wouldn’t have happened had we gotten that last orders of beer) makes me say “no more!”. But I’m not sure I’ll be able to honor that promise since there really is no other good way for me, my sister and brother to meet up and watch F1 while drinking beer and enjoying good food since we live too far apart, otherwise they could just come over to our place all the time for that 🙂
I’m a huge supporter of freedom of the press. And freedom of speech and all those other beautiful things that democracy brings. Even if they can be used for bad things like oh say starting wars and invading countries left and right. But all in all it does more good than bad. But one thing one has to know and think about is not trusting everything you read and instead ask “what’s their angle? what do they have to gain from this?”. Everyone knows Michael Moore’s documentaries that go into that grey area in between “telling the truth” and “not quite lying”.
Well for the past few weeks my new employer Carema have suffered the fate of having the media against them. And reading the headlines and articles in the newspapers/web in the morning while going to work and when I get to work I get “our” version of the truth and although they have the same facts, it’s just angled differently. And I don’t have access to any classified information, it’s all on the web. But most people aren’t interested in reading our side of the story since it’s much more fun / juicy / interesting to read the medias version than the other side of the story.
It’s all pretty frustrating – but still, huge supporter of freedom of the press. I just wish people would care more for finding out the truth than taking the headlines at face value.
I’m actually thinking about buying some random Diablo 3 beta account out there but everytime I’m hit with the thought of “really?? pay money that you have a thousand different things to spend it on than a beta for a computer game” and I give up on it. Only to look into it again the day after!
Actually the only thing stopping me is really the risk of being ripped off, like I almost was when I sold my old Warcraft account. Not so much the money but the idea of getting ripped off so easily online when your better judgement is saying “no”.
But I still wanna play Diablo more than a kid wants to open his presents on Christmas morning!!!
Slowly getting how things are setup here and what’s doing what. But it feels I could work here for a year and still I’d be surprised when some server popups up because there are so many everywhere doing things it’s impossible to get them all.
The bad thing now is that the media here in Sweden is doing everything they can to paint the company I started working for as “the evil empire” because of things that went down in some elderly care centers and that wouldn’t make anyone feel good about just starting working there. Kinda reminds me of the “did the subcontractors building the deathstar know that the empire was evil and did they condone the empire by taking the job there”-discussion from “Clerks” 🙂
If you wind the clock back 10 years I was just starting my career as “consultant” and driving around Stockholm doing all kinds of computer magic. Everything from installing a few PCs to travelling the world. But everytime I was either involed in how the computer system was built up and evolved or it was so well documented that I had it all under control. It didn’t happen that often that I got to a customer and had no clue what their computer environment looked like.
And when I was eomployed by Vinge full time I had more knowledge of their IT systems than the people who worked there since they had only worked there a year and I’d been there on and off for four years. And after 5 more years I knew the IT systems inside and out even though it changed a lot over a year and I often had to find that out myself!
But now I’m at a big company with hundreds of servers and systems and I have no clue what’s what or what server does what and most importantly where to look when something is broken! I’m doing all I can to learn it but it’s going slowly. Thing is I have no reference point that I can use to know if I’m learning things fast enough or if I’m looking like a total noob! … but it’s only day two!