Ok. I'm frustrated. I have to admit it. I'd love to put a nice "I love Britain" posting here but Im surprisingly aggravated by just about everything at the moment. Things are slightly different...just different enough often enough that trying to do day to day tasks is difficult. For example if I've just discovered that to use "quote" marks I have to hit a different place on the keyboard. Otherwise I end up with @quote@ marks if I hit where I normally hit. Then I'll try hitting enter and this will happen insead ---> #
The enter button is one more button over and it's hard to reach.
So...who cares about the keyboard you ask? Well it's just one of many things that I run into on a moment to moment basis.
Things I can't Seem to Figure Out. An Incomplete List:
Telephones.
A) How many digits do I dial? 11 sometimes. 8 other times. Sometimes I think it might be something different. I tried dialing phone numbers for days and got about a 10% hit rate.B) Public phones take about a penny a second off you. If you put a pound in and only use 50 pence they DON'T give you the extra money back!
C) Mobile (cell) phones. How do I send a text message? How does that dictionary thing work? Granted this my problems with mobile phones revolve around the fact the last one I owned was in 1999 for about 6 months.
D) Home phones. Apparently you get charged to make out going calls on home phones.
E) I have a pay as you go phone which means you can go to a store and add money on to your acount. My phone's run out and I can't find the damn card!!
Locks - Oh you thought unlocking a door would be simple!!
A) The locks are very often about mid thigh height. Everyone here is 6 feet tall...what the hell?B) About 50% of the time I get the key in the lock and have to jiggle it and twist it for a good 3 minutes before the door magically unlocks.
C) Because I'm in a school where EVERYTHING is locked I now have about 1500 keys and I can't figure out which one is which.
Public Transit
A) Fares change by the number of zones you're going through, and the time of day you travel. How much is it to go to Hainault station? Who knows?!B) There's a thing called an Oyster card which you put money on and then the system deducts money as you go. A real struggle figuring out how this works and what values there are as there are millions of fares. Actually it's good though.
C) If you get of the train and get on to a bus you have to pay an extra fare.
D) It takes me 40-50 minutes to go 8 train stops to school. I often get caught waiting 14 minutes for a train.
E) Many trains refuse to go two extra stops to the transfer point on the line. They simply stop before they get there...to the tune of 4 in a row on my first day. Why don't they go to the end of the line? 2 stops!!
Toilets
A) Mine doesn't flush properly. You have to keep pumping it to get it to go.B) The three toilets I've used are all the same design and just don't flush properly.
Washing Machine
A) Can't do more than half a load at a time.
B) No dryer is standard, all my clothes are wet and I have to go out tonight.
Bank
I opened an account at Lloyds and they couldn't do it same day because they were "short staffed" They said it would open the next day and that I'd recieve a form I had to sign and mail back. Haven't got the form...no account info...is it open?? Crossing the street.
A) Subway means a path that goes down under the road so you can cross over. It's not the path to the transit system FYI.
B) They seem to build roads so that you can't cross them and have intermitent crosswalks every 90 km or so.
Getting Around
A) The road system is so windy and convoluted here that no one knows how to get anywhere. Like, people who have been living in the same general area for years don't know how to navigate out of it. I didn't experience these feelings in Korea. I guess I went in with no expectations of ANYTHING being the same so I just expected everything to be weird and different and I enjoyed it. It was also all much simpler. I had an apartment, phone, internet, tv, pots and pans, furniture, cutlery and everything else in the apartment. Everything was pretty simple there. I walked in, set up a bank account, visits to the government offices were short and productive and I didn't really deal with them anymore. I also had the collecive wisdom of teachers who had figured all this stuff out before. Here I don't seem ot have any of these things so I'm constantly at a loss and frustrated.
9 comments:
You are going to have to get control of the toilet issue. A good flusher compensates for so many of life’s little miseries.
Yeah there's nothing like starting the day hammering away on the toilet handle and begging God for a flush.
GOD! I had so many of the same issues as you when I lived in London. But I only lived there for a month while on a summer study program. We rented a flat and it had this house phone you had to put coins in the phone to use it! And I'm talking about a regular house phone, not like a phone in a phone booth. It was so weird!
And yeah, it is super confusing to figure out the cost of traveling to the different zones. I lived in Zone 2 and I tried to stick to doing stuff within Zones 1 and 2 only for that very reason.
p.s. - our dryer never dried our clothes properly either. Probably the same issue you have - we were putting large loads in that were probably too big for the patheticly wussy English dryers.
... is it any wonder why the British Empire met its demise? Master the flush, and thou shall rule the world!!! BWAAAHAAHAAA!!!
(Plus nobody can figure out what the hell they're saying because of those crazy accents...)
Sounds like you're in the full swing of cultural assimilation! Now just imagine doing all that stuff . . . but in French! Which was exactly what I had to deal with in Paris. Opening a bank account in a foreign place and not understanding what the hell they're talking about? Crazy!
Nah...the real problem is that Burns is just a whiner :)
I went through all this in Korea but things were basically done for me or were set up for me because I didn't speak the language. Also, I had the collective wisdom of other teachers. They'd say "You go here to get this form to get this done." Unfortunately very little of this information is obvious or available at the moment.
Long time listener, first time caller....
Dave, I giggled like a little schoolgirl at all your England headaches, and I remember them well. I went to three different banks trying to "cash a cheque", and was always told no -- but as soon as I said "I'd like to deposit this cheque into my account," the red sea parted before my eyes. Ah well, the hassles are usually outweighed by the benefits of having a semi-exotic accent.
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