Office life

Food is pretty important for Indonesians and even during ramadhan topic number one for daily office life. My colleagues invited me for breaking the fasting to their place, which is mainly just a huge dinner. Therefore everybody has to bring some food, resulting in one week discussion in advance who will bring what, how much and how it might taste- keep in mind, that’s during ramadhan, where nobody eat and drink during the day!
Anyway my colleagues don’t just chat personally to each other- they are using all kind of modern communication tools to organize like email, messenger, text messages e.g.. Once I got back to office from lunch- yes I am allowed to eat, I had more than 10 new messages in my post-box on the topic of “breaking the fasting”.
Another main part of daily office life are the daily freshly provided snacks by one the office members. As this is a serious problem and this is a “technical” office I do received nearly one week before idul fitri an email with the topic “snack schedule” with an attached excel file. In this excel file every office member can check, when he or she has to provide “snacks” for the whole office. Today everybody came back to the office from holidays. First thing they checked where the provided snacks, but their weren’t any, cause the responsible guy didn’t showed up yet. A little bit later he arrived and put his “snack box” as usual on the snack-table in the middle of the office. The office boy- yeah that’s Indonesia, is than in charge to prepare everything. The today provided snacks included a bottle of red fanta, garlic nuts, cookies kind of pudding and a can of dole tropical fruits! The office boy was really not amused, cause he didn’t know how to open. It sounds really strange when he tried to open the can in the kitchen, but finally he managed. So you could imagine its always a hit and miss with the snacks.
The importance of the snacks seems to be adopted also by my other western colleague: Even he is in Bali for holidays, he ask me by text message if everything is all right and of cause what kind of snacks are provided today.
Stay tuned for more existing daily life stories!