The GirlAlive Blog

Some days I hate the UK. Today is one of those days. I called the hospital to find out what is going on with the induction I'm supposed to be starting on Monday. They say, "Did you get a letter about an appointment with occupational health?" I told them that I didn't. Because I didn't. So she says my letter about induction must have gotten lost in the mail and tells me she would check and call back in 10 minutes.

So 10 minutes later she calls and says, "Occupational health scheduled you for an appointment on March 28th and you didn't show up." They never told me about the appointment, which makes it difficult to get there. So she gives me the number of occupational health and tells me she'll have to postpone my induction until after I see them.

So I call occupational health. The guy totally cops an attitude like nothing ever gets lost in the mail (when in my experience about 20% of the Royal Mail goes missing). He's treating me like I'm lying about never getting the letter, and says that the earliest I can get an appointment is May 17th. So it's going to be another month until I can get a paycheck, and that is only if the hospital is willing to wait another month for me to start work.

Why didn't anyone at the hospital tell me that I'd be getting a letter from occupational health so that I could find out what happened when it never came?

Why didn't anyone at occupational health send a follow-up letter when I missed my appointment?

Why didn't anyone at the hospital contact me to let me know that I couldn't start work until I made a new appointment with occupational health?

If anyone in this vast beurocratic labyrinth had bothered to actually communicate with me, I could have rescheduled the appointment weeks ago and had it done by now. Instead, they all sit on their asses assuming that I know what they need from me. Why would I assume anything about occupational health appointments when I've never even heard the phrase until today, when I called them to find out what was going on? They need to give me a health interview before I start my job. Why would I even consider that possibility when it would be completely illegal where I come from?

I hate this country. I hate the endless beurocracy. If I was back in the US and I got hired, I would have been working at that job for over a month by now. As it is, I'm unemployed at least until May 17th, and maybe indefinately if they get as sick of this stupid game as I am, and just give up on hiring me.

I want to go home. I want to go to a country where you actually have a job when you've been hired somewhere. I want to go to a country where people tell you when something has gone wrong with the process so that it can be fixed. I want to go to a country where people f***ing talk to each other instead of having a form letter for everything! I hate it here. I haven't even started my job and I'm already tired of working with these incompetent morons.

Alana

www.girlalive.com

Posted by Alana at 02:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

One of my favorite things here in the UK is giggling at their commercials.  You see, in the UK, some words mean very different things.  They use the phrase "going potty" to mean "going crazy".  And a fag here is a cigarette.  So I giggle uncontrollably everytime the guy in the commercial says, "Can I nick a fag?"  Here that means, "Can I borrow a cigarette?"  In the US, that would mean, "Can I cut a small notch in a gay man?"  And there's another one about how people are, "going potty over our mattress deals."  So to my ears, they're literally wetting themselves.

Here, you may theoretically hear someone say, "I'm going potty because I haven't had a fag in hours."  To my ears they are saying, "I'm crapping all over because I haven't had gay sex for hours."  And "going potty over a fag" means that they are pooping on a gay man.  When you're an American in the UK, you get to have a lot of little private jokes that the British people don't understand.

The guy who does the voice of Homer Simpson once said, "Here in Great Britain you would say, 'Would you like a lift in my lorry,' but in America we would say, 'Would you like an elevator in my truck.'"

Anyway, over here it is perfectly acceptable to "go outside and light up a fag."  In America, we call that a "hate crime."

Alana

www.girlalive.com 

Posted by Alana at 12:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Okay, so every day I go to Babble and I see how big the puzzle is for the day and how I'm doing in the rankings and all that stuff.  Usually I think, "Maybe I'll do it later."  Sometimes I do, and sometimes I don't.  When I decide to do it, I print out a list of clues that a nice person posts on the web so that I know the first 2 letters of all the words.  Then I cross off the words when I find them.

Today I decided to do my puzzle and I went to print out the clue sheet.  I always copy and paste into a word processor so that I do not waste paper.  I got everything set in Word, and it said that my margins were not set right.  When it "corrected" them, it set my margins for something like 11 inches wide on paper that is only 8 inches wide!  Word is very stupid!  So I set it back and tried to print.  It said that my paper settings were not the same as the printer.  So I clicked the "ignore" button and it went back to whining about the margins.  So I thought, "Screw you, Microsoft" and I opened WordPerfect. 

Once in WordPerfect I set the margins and did everything, and it said, "There is no response from the printer."  That means my husband's computer is not turned on. (That also means that Word was too stupid to figure out that there was no printer, and it just kept whining about the margins and paper size because it totally couldn't see that the printer was turned off.)  So I went downstairs and turned the computer and the printer on.  Then I tried again.  It still could not find the printer.  I closed WordPerfect and opened it again.  This time it gave no errors, but still did not print the list!  I went downstairs and the printer said, "printing".  That was a big lie.  If it had been printing, there would have been some paper with printing on it shooting out of the printer.  There was not.

After that I gave up on my computer, copied the list into a word processor on my husband's computer and printed it from there.  After all that, I could finally do the Babble puzzle.   

So that's how boring my life is, sitting around and waiting for my job to start.  I was almost completely out of money last week, but just in time for my credit card payment to be due, I got my federal income tax rebate and I got a 401k refund from my last job.  So now I hopefully have enough money to last until I start getting a paycheck.

Alana

www.girlalive.com 

Posted by Alana at 04:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For the last few weeks I haven't posted much because my parents have been visiting.  They had never left the country before, except to go to Canada, which doesn't count.  Cause it's Canadia.

We brought them to Edinburgh Castle, and the Royal Museum and the Scottish Museum and Rosslyn Chapel and Princes Street and the Royal Mile and Camera Obscura and Mary King's Close and they went on their own to the Highlands to see Loch Ness and Urquhart Castle.

Then we went to Wigan and my parents got to meet my husband's parents.  I was happy to see their house and see that it wasn't the trashed piece of junk our house is.  So it wasn't my husband's parents who were the pigs in the family.  It's good to know.  I like my in-laws.  They're very nice.

After that we also took a drive up the coast and saw a car museum that my dad wanted to see.  It was actually very fun and a cute little museum.  Then we went to Dirleton Castle, which I think was my favorite castle.  I love Edinburgh Castle, but it is a different experience because it is still a working castle, with a lot of "do not touch".  Dirleton is partially a ruin, so you are allowed to run all over and climb on stuff and sit in the old window seats and look down the medival toilets. 

Now my parents have gone back home and my husband is back to work.  So I'm back home watching bad daytime tv and spending hours working on the Babble puzzle for the day.  I think I might be starting work on May 1st, but I'm not sure.

Alana

 

Posted by Alana at 12:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today me and my visitors took the rental car down to Wigan to visit my husband's family.  I got to meet his aunt and uncle and his grandmother.  I like his Gran because she is somewhere around 90 but still all stubborn and feisty even though she's almost blind.

On the way down to England, we saw a whole lot of sheep.  More than normal because it is "lambing" season so there are little baby sheep all over the place.  They're very cute, but my husband would not let me take one home.

We also stopped at Tebay Services, which is a really nice service station on the M6.  They had all kinds of good stuff and for lunch I had a crayfish sandwich and some Japanese seaweed and peanut things.  I also had a tiramisu Kit Kat, which was really good.

On the way home I saw a cloud that looked just like a pig man with an afro.  It reminded me of the Wookalar (sp?) from the Don Knotts movie "Private Eyes".

Alana 

Posted by Alana at 10:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'm sick.  I think I caught something from one of the nasty little children at the castle the other day because I currently have the worst cold that I have had in years.  Since moving here, I've mostly been sequestered away in our house, and now that I'm out among the people I find that I have no immunity to the crazy British viruses.

I have to go blow my nose for a few more days.

Alana 

Posted by Alana at 10:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I still haven't started my job.  I think I'm going to end up starting around the first of May.

For the next week or so, I won't be able to answer my email so much because I'm really busy.  I've got some family in town and I've been showing them around Edinburgh.  So I'm spending a lot of time touring museums, cooking for everyone here, and then being a good host and mingling and playing Uno and stuff in the evenings.  

We're also trying to figure out why we keep finding ants in our living room.  

Alana 

Posted by Alana at 10:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)