Asking for your cake ala mode and other life lessons

Last week I was at a dinner for a conference that I was attending at a nice restaurant. It was one of those things where you order off the two choices on the menu and the meals get brought out on a great swarm of activity. At the end of the meal we had a choice of chocolate or rum cake, the desserts were brought out and our table started eating the delicious cakes when someone noticed a discrepancy at the table. Someone was eating a chocolate cake but there was something else on his cream. Not just regular ice cream but the delicious homemade kind that makes your plain old piece of chocolate cake turn into a symphony in your mouth. Ice cream wasn't on our menu, so how did this man conduct what amounted to a conference dessert
coup d'état? He said he asked for his dessert ala mode. As we all sat in dumbfounded silence, I realized our collective disappointment was about more than a naked cake, it was about our failure to negotiate a better deal. How many times are we given two options and we confine our selves to those choices? There is a whole suger filled world out there and we are missing it because we don't look outside of what is presented. So the next time you are offered dry chicken or fish at a conference, ask for the chef to whip up a fresh vegetarian option or if you get two mediocre grant proposals, search for something better. You can have your cake ala mode too, you just need to ask.