Some words from Carl

Sue has kept you pretty much up to date relative to our house hunting and move over to London. I thought I might share just a few lines about what it’s like to start working over here and some of the differences in the British way of doing things.

First of all nothing happens quickly; there are layers of people and process and forms that demand to be respected and there’s no way of getting around them even for a relatively senior person such as myself and even for minor things. Oh well!

Second, given that I still have a large share of responsibilities that are US centric, the 4-5 hour time difference makes for a strange day. I devote the mornings, as much as I can, to London “stuff” and the afternoons and early evenings to US “stuff’, all of it over the phone or via email. I miss the human interaction. I know this will change as the London stuff takes up more and more of my time but it is an adjustment.

Another adjustment is the commute; I am back to riding the subway or tube as it is called here. It is very efficient, about 35 minutes on the train(s) to either of my two offices, with a ten minute walk to the tube station from our flat. So, all in all, a 45 minute door-to-door journey. I leave about 7:30 in the morning and the trains are already crowded at that point, a bit of a surprise for me, but people tell me that that’s what I should expect. There are a huge number of transportation choices in London, the tube, buses, various rail systems internal to the city and, of course, commuter rail lines to the various suburbs. Finally there is British Rail to the outlying areas of the country. It’s going to be a while before all this is sorted out and it should be fun doing it.

Finally just a few words about our experiences with Capital One, the credit card company. We opened a new VISA account with them because they don’t charge F/X fees for converting $ to GBP or vise-versa so it seemed like a good idea to charge as much each month to this account and just pay one bill in US $ and be done with it. Great theory if only the card could work. For reasons too numerous to mention I have been on the phone with their customer (dis)service people probably a dozen times in 4 days, from India to God knows where, trying to get them to lift various odd restrictions and holds on the card all, allegedly, designed to prevent fraud. You can’t believe how frustrating this has been and I am still not sure if the card works, but after my last conversation yesterday I think it might be OK. For someone who has spent a lifetime building up and nurturing an excellent credit rating this is really very frustrating.

Well enough minutiae for now.

Best, Carl.