Gruezi Zürich

Monday, Oct 27th, 2008 Hang Seng -12.7 %
06.47 a.m.

I don't really need an alarm clock. Ever since I came to Zürich, now more than a year ago, I had to get up more or less at the same time. The Swiss are early starters, and meetings before nine are the rule rather than the exception. For some reason, they didn't tell me about that in the application procedure. Maybe they were afraid I wouldn't take the job. Maybe they thought it wasn't worth mentioning. Maybe it's normal for them. Who knows, what they think...But then, a year ago everything was different. After a number of years working here there and everywhere as a freelancer, I landed myself an offer for a permanent job with one of the worlds largest private banks. Apart from the salary, which was average at best, the perks looked good and more importantly, it came with a pension plan which would hopefully allow me to fill up the gap that my lifestyle of lucrative, but fast changing contracts in even faster changing locations had created. The opportunity to live in Zurich was appealing too. The city with the best quality of life in Europe, according to a survey I once read in the papers.

I don't know who they asked for that survey, but it must have been a smoker. Only in theory the air in Switzerland is cleaner. In practice, they smoke everywhere, except in the office where it is forbidden. But restaurants, bars, tram stops, platforms and any footpath are not granted the luxury of normal air that other people (here indicated as "non-smokers", as if smoking is the standard and the "nons" are the wet blankets) can't refuse to inhale. Whereas the rest of the world has slowly come to deem this habit anti-social, the Swiss label it as "freedom". As with a lot of other things, it might take a while before reality sinks in.

Getting up at 6.47 means making a cup of coffee, going into the living room of my small, but adequate apartment and switch on the telly, only to watch CNBC poor yet another load of miserable figures from the Asian markets overnight performance into our lives. After the first three minutes I figure I lost another two-thousand Euros from my already dried up savings and investments, I switch the damn thing off and in the best of moods (not) I make my way to the bathroom for a triple s, pick a suit and tie that hopefully impresses my superiors to the degree where they don't fire me just yet, and head for the bank where a new day of cost-cutting, downsizing and other extraordinary measures are waiting for me.

Welcome to Zurich. Beautifully situated on the north side of it's lake with the same name. More jewellers than supermarkets. And the trams go on the dot. I need them, as I can't afford a car.
You see I'm not really a banker, as in: I don't own a bank. I merely work for one.
And by the way, I'm not really Swiss either.