A New Routine Every Decade...

(spot the spelling mistake if you speak German...)

I'm a creature of habit when it comes to my lunch routine as a blog post from 12 (!) years ago testifies. About 95% of my nine years at Coma HQ I had the same type of cold sandwich lunch and a warm dinner together with my then-boyfriend. This changed when I started working at the Firm where we got to enjoy a nice restaurant lunch on the company in Vienna (and a great free canteen lunch when visiting their bigger offices elsewhere) that meant I was not really hungry enough for a proper dinner any more and had no problem skipping that altogether. With the exception of business trips when overeating was on the agenda every day anyway, this was my routine for the 10 years I worked at the Firm. Also, I did not have a live-in partner and my whole "life routine" was very different than during my Coma HQ years, with nobody waiting for me to come home from work. These days, I enjoy a typically Austrian work environment: ugly nondescript office and a subsidised lunch at the canteen that is somewhat hit or miss regarding its culinary offerings. From day 1 I copied my team mates that always order the "half portion" of the lunch dish (there are usually 4 varieties of warm dishes on offer) and take a salad from the buffet every day, too. It's 4 Euros well spent, but I had to adapt from (free) food being available everywhere in the office every day to having to pay for my own meals again and having to think ahead and buy snacks if I felt peckish. To be honest, that half portion does not keep me full until dinnertime really and I now crave (and eat) a proper dinner again on most days. I might not have appreciated all that free food at the Firm as much had I never worked elsewhere before, but since I had, I could never quite get over how spoilt we actually were. Now that those privileges are a thing of the not so distant past, I sometimes think back to the soft-serve ice-cream machine in the dessert corner of one of the canteens in Dublin with nostalgia as it symbolised absolute decadence for me and would definitely feature in my personal dream kitchen if floor space and money were no issue. For the next 10 (?) years, however this new routine of mine is very much o.k.