Woah. This had been sitting in the drafts folder since November 14th of last year. It's even funnier a year later after I met an Austrian in the States who spent a half hour defending the waiter...

A friend and I were in a Viennese cafe the other day when he orderd a beer and a glass of water and I ordered a coffee. It's not normal to order a water with a beer (though it is customary of course to get a water with coffee.) My friend wanted to insure that the waiter accurately heard the order so he emphasized one more time before the waiter left our table "... and please bring a water with that beer."

Promptly, the waiter brought us our drinks: a coffee with accompanying water (as usual) for me and a beer for my friend (no water.) We were both a little non-plussed given the extra effort to communicate that a beer *AND* a water were desired.

This might be a good time to mention that the entire conversation was in German. Both my friend and I have accents but we're fluent so it's not as if it was a language issue.

The waiter had dropped the drinks and was on to the next table so we waited about five minutes, hoping the second (ordered) water would show up. It didn't of course. Finally, my friend caught the waiter's attention and politely asked him for a glass of water.

Exhibiting typical Austrian customer-friendly service, the waiter, walking away from us, turned back and sneered as he said...

"WASSER PASST NICHT ZUM BIER!"

("WATER DOESN'T GO WITH BEER!")

Five minutes later, he appeared with a glass of water.

In thinking about my fall from grace, I came up with a list things that Mercer must have omitted:

1. Dog-droppings. Everywhere.
2. Smoke. Everywhere.
3. Viennese customer service.
4. All the career opportunities.

According to Business Week, I've dropped 26 places in having decided to move.

1. Family and friends.
2. My "Green Trifecta": Public transportation/bikepaths/pedestrian zones.
3. Kaffee/Kuchen on Sunday afternoons.
4. Naschmarkt.
5. The calm
6. Abscence of wall-to-wall advertising

Some of us have the great fortune of getting expatriated and repatriated at the expense of the company or organization we're working for. Some of us don't. How to get your stuff inexpensively from one country to the next, that's the question.

One of my best tips in Austria in Loipersdorf. I try to convince anybody I think would like it to go. It's a great wellness experience and only a few hours from Vienna. The problem is, when I do some research in order to pass along links to help "sell" the place, I rarely find well-designed websites to do so. For all of my friends and acquaintances who aren't familiar with the Austrian wellness scene, here's some advice to Austrian businesses in general and tourist locations in specific:

1. Emphasize pictures of main attractions
2. Improve the quality of content in English

It's not just the native language English-speaking expat community who might be interested! This advice is applicable towards all potential consumer populations (read: neighboring countries) whose second language is English.

The DJs from our wedding are going to be opening their "studio." Check it out on this coming Saturday.

If only I could find a mash-up like Housing Maps for Vienna. Maybe I'll slap some Perl together for screen-scraping a couple of german-language resources to get it to happen. Yeah, in all of my copious free-time.

I like Vienna for so many things but you have to love the customer service ethic that pervades all Viennese service professions, including in the doctor's office (chuckle!) Here's a real exchange - translated into English from German - between a patient (P) and a front desk attendant (A) that I witnessed today. P: Excuse me but I've been waiting for over two hours. How much longer is it going to be? A: (somewhat agitated) I'm sorry, we're really full today. P: It's really too much. Other people have come after me and they're alredy finished. A: (really agitated) NO, THAT'S NOT RIGHT. THEY CAME AND THEY WENT AND THEY CAME AGAIN. (P walks back to waiting room, A walks around corner to lab, comes back after finishing something, and yells at P who is no longer in sight...) A: ARE YOU GOING TO STAY OR ARE YOU GOING?!? (No response from P. A waits and waits and waits and finally returns to her business.)

I came across this conference here in Vienna and became nostalgic. I was at the first one so many years ago and thought it was great. I was working as a volunteer and had the chance to meet Ted Nelson, whom I wouldn't have been able to discern from Adam at the time but whom I subsequently learned was a pioneer in my field. Sorry Ted, I was just getting into the information profession (a.k.a. IA a.k.a. HCI a.k.a. User Centered Design a.k.a. UX.) Anyway, I found Scope2 and was reminded about a scratch I've been itching for a while. Do you know what I've wanted for the longest time? A little handle (a.ka. link) that says "Add this to my calendar" and then *poof!* it's in my electronic calendar. It'd be nice if that were for MS Outlook ('cause I'm such a geek when it comes to Oulook) but what about for Google Calendar? The API's there. I mean, you can Digg a story, auto-add feeds to your news aggregator, and post a link to deli.cio.us, so why can't you capture something in your calendar? Now, I've checked out the Google Calendar interface and let me say, I'm not impressed from a GUI standpoint ... yet. It has potential and probably will become the standard calendaring tool in the near future but the problem is making a browser act like a windows app, which all the JavaScript in the world won't achieve. Well, maybe *ALL* the JavaScript in the world could massage a browser into an Outlook-like app but Google Calendar isn't there yet and until it is, I'm sticking with Outlook.