End of the Year Thought


WaiterPCI know that with this post I’m breaking the promise I made in the last one, but it was planned to be posted as an end of the year thought since a long time. After all this might be an example of the good and bad of being an independent software developer following the motto “it’s ready when it’s ready”. 😉

The 2004 has been a particular year, with some changes in my private life and pretty different from what I planned at the beginning, so it couldn’t end without some thoughts about the hard work as a waiter during the last months. I benefited from this experience in many ways, well beyond what people could think, especially the ones who don’t read the blog. 😉

This was an article published on the local daily newspaper La Provincia about a charity dinner held at Villa d’Este the last November. I worked voluntarily for that dinner but I didn’t like at all some of the things I saw there and the tone of the article, so I wrote a first letter to the director of the newspaper published in the feature with the same name. The letter was ironical and meant to propose a thought to the readers, but it wasn’t appreciated, to say the least, by some colleagues, who felt involved in some way, so I had to write a second letter to clarify my point of view. Fortunately someone caught the point and the discussion went on with a letter by Luciano Forni, a former senator, and with others from some readers here, and here.

I got compliments for the courage of writing something like that, but I’ve been also surprised by the venom tongues of some colleagues, people who are used to accept compromises to be able to work, think always about money (or the lack of it) or haven’t enough neurons to distinguish irony from charge. My letter was a general thought about the hypocrisy in the modern world, which is even more actual if you consider what’s happened with the Incredible Tide in South East Asia, the so called third world…

I close this post with a sentence inspired by the director of a restaurant I worked for during this summer, a long time friend, brilliant and always busy in keeping his old habits and his life style: in his opinion italians should return doing humble works like in the past, in particular young ones with a degree and the “stench under their nose”.

How true I can say and I appreciated his words even more since he was referring to me as an example of a good worker.

So let’s close with the sentence I remember from the movie Life is Beautiful by Roberto Benigni, said to the waiter-Guido (Benigni) by his Uncle: “You’re serving, but you’re not a servant. Serving is a supreme art, God is the first servant. God serves men, but he’s not a servant to men!

Back to work now, “le grand cirque” of the world must go on! 🙂

Update: irony inside irony, if you’ll have the patience to read my two letters, just take a look at the horoscope at the bottom of the page, I’m a Leo. 😉

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