eptivity

As you may well be aware, Internets, I don’t have access to you at home. This is why:

We live in a brand new building. When one moves into a brand new building here, not only is one required to purchase fixtures like bathroom mirrors and towel racks, but one is also required to arrange for the phone line to be installed. We heard this rumor from our letting agent that our landlord would probably be willing to split the cost with us, but this did not come to fruition, which leaves us to pay the £124 installation fee. Fine. Not ideal, but whatevs. A phone line is mandatory for broadband so I can work from home; we will pay $248 to have it installed.

I call the phone company and made an appointment for an engineer to come out and activate the line, a mere 2.5 weeks from my initial call. On the appointed date, no engineer appears or calls to explain why, so I call the phone company to inquire. Phone company reports that the line is active HOORAY! I have no way to test it, however, as it turns out that UK phone jacks are different than ours, so our American phone is useless for this task. One £4 testing phone later, we have…no phone service. No dialtone, no static, nothing. Stephan takes the phone to work the next day to make sure the phone isn’t defective. It’s not.

I try to call the phone company, only my cellphone has inexplicably stopped allowing me to call them. When I finally get to talk to them (a story in itself), they run a line test and confirm that, indeed, the phone line is active and there are no problems from their end.

I call the letting agent, as it appears to be a problem with the wiring inside the actual building. Unfortunately, it is now Bank Holiday Weekend, which means no one can do anything for another 3 days.

Five days later, the letting agent finally puts me in touch with the construction company customer service.

A quick, informational aside: Apparently, what happens here is that each residence has a primary phone socket, which is what we are paying £124 to activate. If one wants any of the other sockets in your home (”extensions”) activated, it’s an additional £60 (each? Not sure; skipping that, thank you). Our particular apartment has what our letting agents like to call a “media panel,” which has a few outlets, satellite feed for our TV, phone sockets, etc. It may surprise you to learn that this convenient, centrally located panel in our living room is, in fact, not the location of our primary phone line; it’s the extension. The primary phone line is the two bare wires sticking out of the wall in the second bedroom.

Apparently only the construction company guy had this key piece of information at hand.

“One last call” to the phone company today, to request an engineer coming out to install what Stephan and I like to call “a FREAK-ing phone socket.”

Another quick, informational aside: For some reason known only to themselves, the phone company (British Telecom) has the most horrible system of customer service I’ve ever experienced. I have no fewer than 5 BT “customer service” numbers to all different departments that they have given me at one time or another, none of which has at any time actually connected me with someone who can help me. I always have to be transferred by a person who is very wearied by my inability to dial the correct number. Try this for fun when you have a few hours to kill sometime: go to BT.com, and just try to find a contact number. I dare you!

Call no. 1: “helped” by 3 different people in different departments, including 15 minutes of on-hold time, culminating in my line being picked up by an operator who apparently cannot hear me repeatedly shouting “hello?” over the sounds of—NOTE: if you read nothing else, read this next part—him singing “Can’t Touch This.” Sometimes you have to laugh to keep from crying.

Call no. 2: “helped” by 3 different people in different departments (despite calling the number that someone specifically gave me in the last call, I still don’t get the right department), including 12 minutes of on-hold time, and two different people trying to correct my address, culminating in my being cut off because I run out of minutes on my pay-as-you-go phone.

Call no. 2.5: call to the pay-as-you-go phone people to top up my phone; amazingly, good, prompt, efficient service.

Call no. 3: “helped” by 3 different people in different departments before finally, finally reaching someone is a) is helpful b) speaks clearly c) actually apologizes for my troubles. Hope! The future of BT is in your hands!

One of my favorite things about England is the glottal stop (the speech pattern where you don’t actually say the Ts in the middle of words like bottle and water). You know, like when Shrek is admiring Puss In Boots’ “wee li’l boots.” Or when Regina Spektor is singing about how it’s gonna get better, better, better, better, better, better, better, better and switches from glottal stoppage to regular pronunciation in the middle of the verse.

Just about every actual English person we know uses it, and we think it’s fantastic. It’s one of my personal favorite speech patterns because not only is it fun to use, but it’s fun to listen to and the name for it has a T in the middle, for crying out loud. Like how “lisp” has an S and “abbreviation” has five syllables.

As if that weren’t enough, they call peanuts still in the shell “monkey nuts” here.

I don’t know if you know this, but England has been around for a while. I’m fairly certain that this is behind the obvious absence of urban planners in the development of their street systems. It is almost impossible for the uninitiated to get to where they want to go without very specific directions, a detailed map (that’s the “A to Zed” guide, not the ”A to Z”), or, ideally, a GPS (”sat-nav”). It may also explain why rumors abound about people who have never left the town they grew up in—like growing up in Beaverton and never venturing into the wild world of Portland.

Along with a mind of her own, our particular sat-nav has a few favorite commands:
“Drive [point-something] miles and then enter roundabout”
“Enter roundabout”
“Enter roundabout and take [some number generally between 'first' and 'sixteenth'] exit”

And with a strange mixture of glee and disappointment in our shortcomings:
“When possible, make a U-turn”

They do love their roundabouts here. We’ve seen exactly one stop sign since arriving, and this one English person we know had to be prompted for the word “intersection” when it came up in conversation.

One of the more infamous is the Magic Roundabout in Swindon. Stephan drove through it last week, and I hear that it is only through the grace of some guy named Russ, who he was following, that he made it through without incident:

The best part is that the mini-roundabouts go clockwise, like normal roundabouts, but the big center roundabout goes counterclockwise (”anti-clockwise”).

Are we surprised that I’m not planning on driving here?

We’re having this problem lately where whoever happens to be driving speeds a little, accidentally. The theory: we’re constantly converting things like money and temperature in our respective heads, so we have a vague sense that we should be converting everything.

Surely there must be a difference between 80 mph on I-5 and the M5!

Now that we have been in England for 12 whole days, I am fully qualified to pass judgment on the country and culture at large.

Great

Vegetarian foods are labeled with a green “V” symbol, which makes them very easy to find.

When you’re on a one-way street, there are lighted signs with blue arrows indicating as such.

If you get caught having not paid for the train, they add your name, home address, and amount you were fined to a poster that is then prominently displayed at all the stations.

Programs like this are called “schemes” instead of “programs,” which makes things sound much more devious.

Somebody actually said “toodle pip” to me the other day, and I don’t think he was entirely joking.

On April Fool’s Day, the BBC ran a commercial featuring a group of penguins that flies to the South American rainforest for the winter.

At the Sunday market, you can buy meat out of the side of a van and barely outdated magazines at 3/£2.50, which is considerably cheaper than their £3+ retail price.

Starbucks lets you drink out of real mugs if you aren’t getting your coffee take away (to go).

The sandwiches and fresh fruit and vegetables, when we can find them, are phenomenal. Which I would expect from the country that invented both the sandwich and not getting scurvy.

Not only do the “school crossing” signs display children running toward education with an eagerness usually reserved for a parent, child, and teddy bear sprinting across the US/Mexican border, but the “elderly people crossing” signs feature silhouettes of presumably elderly people hunched over their canes.

On the way back from Stratford-Upon-Avon, there are lambs wearing little red jackets.

Not So Great

The exchange rate is almost $2 to £1, which with the addition of the higher cost of living and VAT means it costs about $20 to go to Subway.

Non-mixing taps. I still have no idea how to wash my hands. I may have to skulk around the basins in the WC, spying on proper English ladies.

Our apartment, in a brand new building that doesn’t even have carpet yet, has not a single closet (”fitted wardrobe”). Silly Americans, we didn’t even check, and now have to buy wardrobes.

Flytipping: a completely made-up word to describe dumping in unauthorized areas, which in the US would eventually result in criminal trials involving 8×10 color glossy photos with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was, but which here appears to be something of a national pastime.

Different

A subway is a pedestrian walkway that goes under the street.

All kitchen appliances are a standard 60 cm wide—refrigerator, stove (”cooker”), dishwasher, and washing machine. Washer/dryer combos are very common, and apparently the dryers “dry” by running a sheet of cold water through the back of the machine, which is supposed to condense out the hot water in the clothes. So far we have heard of approximately zero people who have had success with this method.

There are CCTV cameras everywhere. Particularly eerie since I just finished reading 1984.

Tram tickets are bought once you board the tram, which means that the conductor has to monitor exactly who gets on at each stop and track them to their seats to extract the correct fare.

In Other News

Yes, I already have my library card.

We decided to not get a furnished apartment after all, which means that the apartment that we move in to next weekend will be a veritable Ikea showroom.

We met a real live Scottish woman whom we could barely understand.

We got 2 or so inches of snow the night before last, but it’s gone now.

This week, we’re off to a hotel in Swindon. All I know about Swindon is that my friend Eddie Izzard described it as a “knackered, sort of Fresno town.” Meaning absolutely nothing to me, having never been there either.