In England they’re just called muffins

There are times when you forget that a national name is tied up in the name of the thing you are looking for. A great example of this for an American is the “English Muffin”. You can get these all over the place in the USA and they’re great. I used to eat them when I was a kid, and still buy them occasionally for breakfast on weekends.

Today, my wife and I were at the local market to buy some lunch and dinner, and I saw a lady in line behind me carrying a box that said muffins on it. I, of course, thought of the thing that you get in the USA when you buy a muffin. That thing is a little cake with a fun wrapper, the ones I like usually have blueberries in them.

The muffins that this lady was holding, however, didn’t look anything like muffins. When I got a good look at them, I realized that they were English Muffins, and then I remembered that I was in England. So here, they are just called muffins.

So, you may ask, do they have the cake like thing with blueberries in it, that I like so much? The answer is yes, and it’s called an American Muffin.

Back in London

It’s been a really busy couple of weeks. Jenna and I spent the week before last in Mountain View on my monthly visit to the Googleplex. We got back to London on Tuesday afternoon, and then I was in Zurich on Friday, so it’s been crazy. However, we have several new stories to tell, so keep an eye out.

My hate affair with mayonnaise and banking

Well, we finally got unpacked and settled just in time for Allen to return to the US on his first of monthly business trips to California. As I’m unemployed, I’ve joined him and am enjoying free, unencumbered access to the internet (got an email from BT today saying our broadband was FINALLY set up!!!). I’m liking London, but have noticed several differences, some of which Allen has already talked about. My two big things are mayonnaise and banking.

First, mayonnaise… It’s a condiment. I like just enough of it to make the bread on my sandwich moist (Marks & Spencer and Pret a Manger both have good pre-maid boxed up sandwiches). As far as I’m concerned, I should not be able to notice mayonnaise on a sandwich. I should definitely not see clumps of mayonnaise oozing from between the slices of bread. It seems that the English LOVE mayonnaise, and a lot of it. I was so happy to find a sandwich at the local Marks & Spencer that was called Chicken with no Mayo. When I opened it up, there was still something on the bread, but in the amount I prefer. It turned out to be yogurt, which is interesting, but at least it has no clumps of mayonnaise. Unfortunately, all their other sandwiches have way too much mayo, a fact which I will have to adjust to (or scrape off).

Second, banking… You can’t just open a bank account in the UK, at least not like in the US. Allen’s company has a relationship with Citibank, allegedly making it easier to open one. We met with a Citibank new accounts person the weekend we arrived. To open an account involved filling out an application, getting a letter of reference from Allen’s employer, and waiting. I’m not even sure if our account is approved yet. Part of the application requested employment information. As I am currently unemployed, I left that part blank. The account person, in reviewing the application, asked if I was a housewife. I explained to her that I was a social worker, but was unemployed while I waited for my social work registration to come through in the UK. I explained that I quit my job so we could move. At the end of my explanation as to why I did not feel I was a housewife, she still said she needed to put something down on the application and said she would put down housewife. Allen said he could see the steam coming off my head. I am most definitely not a housewife. I prefer the label of unemployed to that!

In contrast, this week, back in California, we opened a Citibank account in ten minutes. They didn’t even need to know what our occupations were!

Phone is easy, Broadband is hard

It’s been about a week since I posted anything here, and the main reason for that is the lack of a broadband connection in the flat. It’s ironic that the broadband connection as hard to get as the phone was easy.

As you may recall:

The guy on the phone had said that they would not be able to provision broadband on the line until it had been up for a few days so that they could measure it. He advised me to call back on Tuesday to order it.

I was surprised that they couldn’t provision my broadband request the same day, but decided that maybe I should just call back later and see if I really needed to wait five days to get the process started.

This was the beginning of my indoctrination to BT. When they tell you to call back in five days, they really mean five days, and they won’t be ready a second sooner than that. So each day after I ordered the phone I called BT to ask about broadband, and each day I got some an answer that said to call back in a few days.

On Monday I called the broadband specific help number (instead of the general customer service number 100), and told them I wanted broadband. The guy on the line asked my why I hadn’t asked BT to provision broadband and the voice line at the same time. Ach! I told him I had tried, but was told that they couldn’t do that.

He told me they could do it, but since it hadn’t happened that way, I would still have to wait until Tuesday to request broadband.

On Tuesday I was finally able to put in my request for broadband, and was told it would take 7 days to provision it, so it will actually be tomorrow that the equipment shows up. Unfortunately, I’m back in California for a week, so I won’t find out until I get back to London.

Phone

One of the things that I was dreading was getting a phone hooked up in London. I figured that it would take a couple of weeks while paperwork was shuffled, signed, lost, found, and filed.

Since we don’t even have a UK bank account yet, I half expected BT to tell me to call back when we did. I called them anyway to see if I could get the process started, and it turned out to be really simple. I called from my office and talked to a nice guy who was very friendly. He helped me understand which pieces of the address he was really interested in, and which parts of my phone number (at work) that he wanted.

He said that they would have to run a credit check, and I mentioned that I didn’t have a UK bank account yet. He said that would be no problem, and took a couple of pieces of information. Then he gave me a number and said it would be active soon.

Later that afternoon Jenna called my office from our new London phone number. So it was working within hours of ordering it.

The guy on the phone had said that they would not be able to provision broadband on the line until it had been up for a few days so that they could measure it. He advised me to call back on Tuesday to order it.

Into The Flat

We arrived in London on Thursday 4 May in the morning. Our first task was to get through customs and retrieve our luggage. The arrivals hall was packed that morning as several large flights came in at once. We got in the line for visa holders and waited. I think it took about an hour for us to reach the head of the line, but in the dull haze of transatlantic overnight flight, it’s hard to accurately judge time.

The customs agent was polite and friendly, he pointed out that we needed my work permit to get it stamped, but since we had packed it in our checked luggage he told us to bring it the next time we came through (which will be in a few weeks). He said that it had to be stamped as well as our visas.

Once we were through customs we called our relocation agent to see if we were going to be able to get into our flat. It turned out that the estate agent was in the office and would drive over to the flat to have us sign the final paperwork. So, we grabbed a taxi to Kensington, and managed to remember enough of our address to get to the right place.

We walked over to our building and introduced ourselves to the porters, and told them that we were the new renters for our flat. They were a great help, and took us up to the flat immediately. The porter let us into the flat and brought up our remaining bags, then he showed us around and helped us to understand how all the appliances work. After that he left so that we could settle in.

A little while later the estate agent showed up, we chatted a bit, signed the paperwork, and that was that. We were now the happy residents of a flat in London.

I’m amazed at how simple it was to do this transaction. Between email and wire transfers renting a flat in London was about as easy as renting an apartment in San Francisco. We traded several drafts of the contract as email attachments, and when everyone was agreed Jenna and I wired the first months rent and a six week deposit to the estate agent in London.

The flat is furnished, so we are already making ourselves at home. Our stuff from California is in the UK now and working it’s way through customs. We’ll probably have it delivered next week.

A Colossul Screw Up

I promised a more complete account of the trouble we had with our visas, and now that I’m on a plane en route to London, I’ve got some time to tell the story. It was all caused by an unlikely set of circumstnces, some misinformation, the best intentions of FedEx, and the failure of the British Consulate to follow it’s own procedures or common sense.

The story starts two weeks ago when Jenna and I returned from our house hunting trip in London. I had been informed that my work permit was granted while we were away, and that I would need to use that to apply for a visa. We arrived on a Monday, and on Tuesday we filled out the paperwork to apply for our Visas. We sent the applications that afternoon via FedEx priority to the consulate in Los Angeles. We confirmed that the package was delivered on Wednesday morning.

When we assembled the paperwork for the application we included all of the things they require, bank statements, pay stubs, the printed applications, my work permit, and our passports. We also included a pre-addressed and pre-paied FedEx shipping slip and a FedEx envolope. The idea with the shipping slip and envolope was to ensure that the visas were returned to exactly where they were supposed to go, my office at Google.

We already knew that the consulate was taking five days to process applications, so we didn’t expect to hear anything for the next week. On the following Tuesday we got an email that said Jenna’s visa had been granted, and on Wednesday we got an email that said mine had been granted (I found out later that they had both been granted on Tuesday).

On Friday of last week we had started to get worried. Since the visas had been granted on Tuesday or Wednesday we were expecting to see them in our hands by Thursday or Friday. We called the Consulates 900 number and asked. The guy we spoke to asked us if there was a tracking number in the emails we received (that in retrospect was when I started to get a sinking feeling).

We knew that our FedEx slip hadn’t been used, and there was no tracking number in our confirmation emails. The guy at APTRAN said that we should wait until Monday and call back if we didn’t see the visas before then.

On Monday we called back with the same results. A guy telling us that there should have been a FedEx number in our emails. This call resulted in him sending a message to the consulate to ask someone to call us. No one called us.

So, Monday night we cancelled our Tuesday flight and moved it back to Wednesday, we extended our hotel and rental car through Friday. On Tuesday morning we called APTRAN again right when they opened. We spoke to a lady who said that she would have the Consulate call us, but this time she would mark the message urgent.

Tuesday afternoon we called APTRAN again because we had yet to hear from the Consulate and it was getting late. We had to know if we would need to cancel our flight agian. We spoke to the same lady who agian told us that the Consulate would call and that she had marked our message as urgent.

We waited a few more hours with no results. Jenna suggested that we call the Consulate in Los Angeles directly. We called information in LA and got the main switchboard number for the Consulate. I called about three times before I figured out how to get to an operator (the consulate main number has a phone tree that will trap you in a pre-recorded loop with no way out for several of it’s options).

When I finally got to the choice to talk to an operator I had to wait for about 10 minutes while the phone continued to ring. I could hear the little clicks in the background that indicate that the call was rolling over to one line after another. The phone just rang and rang, but I didn’t have anywhere to go, so I put it on speaker and waited.

Finally an operator answered the call. I explained that I knew he wouldn’t be able to answer visa questions, and that I had already tried the official route, but that things were getting urgent, and I had had no luck with their official anser provider APTRAN.

The operator put me through to someone who he belived could help. That number went straight to a voice mail, and I left a full account of our story, two contact numbers, and all the other relelvant information I could think of.

We received a call back in about 20 minutes, and the lady on the phone had our tracking number. It turned out that the Consulate had sent the visas to our home address even though we had requested them to be sent to my office.

After looking at the tracking information from FedEx we learned that they had attempted to deliver the package on Thursday and Friday, but had deducted that we had moved. Because they thought we moved they didn’t leave a slip, so Jenna and I never knew they had come by.

FedEx was given the wrong address, and our home phone which had already been disconnected. The shippers number that the Consulate used was just a recording that says “Call our 900 number” so there was little FedEx could do at that point.

Once we figured this out, the lady at the Consulate rescheduled the delivery for our hotel and called me back to confirm. I asked her why the didn’t use the shipping insturctions that were included with our application, but she didn’t have any record of that.

When I got off the phone with her, I called FedEx and told them that I would be over to pick up the package from their office right away. By 6pm on Tuesday evening we had our Visas, and were amused to find our original FedEx shipping label included inside the package of materials they shipped back to us.

Here We Go

If you are following along at home, we received our passports late last night, and are flying out today. I’ll post more on the story when we get to London.

No More Motorcycle

One of the challenges in moving to another country for an extended period of time is figuring out what to do with your vehicles. Jenna and I had her car, my car, and my motorcycle to deal with.

My Honda Element sold right away to some friends who needed a new car. That was great, and got us down to two. Jenna’s Honda Civic was the next to sell. Again it went to a friend who needed a new car. My motorcycle (a Honda Shadow) was the hardest to deal with.

We posted it to a couple of for-sale lists, and talked to friends about it, but no one was interested. So, we ended up taking it over to Peninsula Honda to sell it to them.

The batter was dead on the motorcycle so we had to have it towed over to the dealership. The tow truck driver and I got over there with no problem using a few simple rules for caravanning.

After we unloaded the motorcycle the guys at the dealership looked it over, got it started, and took it for a quick spin. They made me two offers. One was to sell it on consignment, the other was to sell it to them outright. The consignment estimate was about $300 more than we thought we would get for it, and the outright offer was about $200 less than we thought we would get.

We ended up taking the offer, and selling it to the dealership. They were great folks, and I’m looking forward to buying a new motorcycle from them when we get back in a couple of years.

Hold Please

The British Consulate in the US doesn’t answer visa inquiries directly. Instead they have outsourced their phone support to a company called ABTRAN for $2.10 per minute. Unfortunately these people are only really set up to tell you if your visa has been issued. Any questions more complex than that (like it seems that the consulate has lost my passport, can you tell me where it is?) have to be routed back to the consulate.

Of course, ABTRAN can’t just transfer your call to the consulate, they have to take a message and forward that on to someone in the consulate who will then “call you back”. I put that in quotes because I’ve been told today, for the second time, that someone in the consulate will call me back. It didn’t happen yesterday, and I’m not holding a lot of hope that it will happen today.

The only difference from yesterday to today is that today I talked to a nice lady instead of the guy I talked to yesterday, and today she said she would mark the call back request as urgent since I had already delayed my flight once.

The other thing I have found through experience with ABTRAN is that they only have one song playing on their hold line. It plays an endless loop of Frank Sinatra singing Summer Wind

Holding Pattern

So for our move to London has gone very smoothly. We sold our cars, packed our house, and made all of the other preperations that you would expect. Everything was going along swimingly. In the midst of all this great progress there was a fear. It was small at first, at the edge of the mind where you could easily shove it aside, but over the last few days it has grown larger and larger.

This fear: The British Consulate seems to have lost our passports.

One would think that a consulate like the one in Los Angeles would know how to deal with people’s passports. You would think that they deal with hundreds a day without misplacing them. You would be wrong.

Two weeks ago, I got my official work permit for the UK. We immediately sent our passports and visa applications off to the consulate in LA. Jenna and I both got email early last week that our visas had been granted. That was the last we heard. We haven’t seen our passports, nor have we been able to get a straight answer out of the embassy.

It could be that FedEx lost our passports, it could be the consulate staff mailed them back to us instead of using FedEx, it could be a lot of things, but so far we have no answers.

So, for right now we have changed our flight from Tuesday to Wednesday. We’ve extended our hotel stay in Mountain View and our rental car through Friday and we’re going to spend some serious time with the consulates 900 number tomorrow to see if we can figure out what happened (that’s right they have a 900 number that charges you $2.10 per minute).

If you were expecting to see us in London on Wednesday morning, we won’t be there. Stay tuned and we’ll post more news as we have it.