A tale of 2 companies

I've got a lot of things to think about when I move. Two of them are my mobile phone, and my SodaStream. I've got a tri-band phone with Virgin, which works in the USA - it's a Nokia 6310i, and it's great. It's a phone, you can talk to people with it (oh, and text them). It plays Snake. And the battery lasts forever, which is all I want in a phone. (Well, not forever, but about 10 days).

So, I wondered if I could take my mobile, stick a new Virgin mobile SIM in it, and use it. So I emailed Virgin Mobile, and heard, well, nothing. At all. Ever.

I've also got a SodaStream, which is a great invention. It's a mystery to me why they don't still sell like they used to. They still market them as a way of making crap fizzy drinks by adding sticky concentrates to fizzy water. But I never use it for that, I just make fizzy water. (It seems an extraordinary waste that lorries are used to take water to Sainsbury's, and then I carry it home in my car, when lovely water comes out of our taps, and my SodaStream puts fizz in it. Anyway, I've got a Fizz Online sodastream machine, and a few years ago SodaStream were taken over by SodaClub, who are an American company. I wondered if I could take my sodastream with me, and get refills there. I emailed Sodaclub customer support, and they sent me an email back, which said:

You mention you have a Soda Stream...I wanted to provide you with some valuable information regarding Soda Stream product availability in the US.  If you still have your old machine...not all machines are compatible with the Soda Club products currently available in the US and Canada.  The only models compatible with the US products are the Soda Club/Soda Stream Design, Jet, Centenary or Edition as these machines are capable of accepting a 110 liter carbonator that is approximately 3-1/2 inches in diameter.  We do not carry the smaller carbonators in the US...we only carry the 110 liter carbonators.

Because parts and products are not available for the Soda Stream line in the US or Canada we do offer a trade in program that would entail you purchasing a new Soda Club package from our website or a local retailer.  After you receive the order for the new package you would then contact our Customer Support Center to learn how to return your old Soda Stream machine for which you will receive a $40 merchandise credit upon receipt of the old machine at our warehouse. We are only able to honor one credit per new machine package ordered.

If you do not have a compatible machine, when ordering your new starter kit we highly recommend one of the Value Packages as this will provide you with an extra carbonator to have in use while future refill orders are being processed and shipped to you.

Ordering online is fast and easy!  Simply go to our website and click on "order a soda maker or check pricing" which is located in light blue along the left hand side of our homepage.  Once you have placed your order, delivery will be made within 7-10 business days.
 
Alternatively, a complete listing of trade shows we will be attending as well as authorized dealers and retailers can be found at the following link: www.sodaclubusa.com/wheretobuy.htm. We are always looking for new dealers and retailers to carry our products if you know of anyone interested in this please do not hesitate to have them contact us.

For any further questions, feel free to contact our Customer Support Center at 800-763-2258.  Our representatives are in the office Monday - Friday 9am- 5pm EST at the number above.

Thank you
Soda Club Customer Support 

Now, how fantastic is that? In my humble experience, most companies never reply to an email to a support type email address (like, for example, Virgin Mobile), or when they do, you get a stock answer from a robot (possibly a real robot, possibly a person acting like a robot), which doesn't answer the question.

(Incidentally, that's not the first time I've been impressed by my dealings with SodaStream/Club - another time my SodaStream stopped working, so I rang them, on a freephone number, and they sent me a bit to fix it, with a spare.)

Sodastream - good for the environment, lovely and fizzy, and nice people too.

Houses: Ratings and sizes

First, I have been very excited about all the lovely looking apartments I found on www.rent.com - however then I found another site apartmentratings.com which has reviews of the various apartment complexes I've been looking at, and they are very gloomy reading. Paper thin walls, poorly functioning appliances, unfriendly management and staff, no parking, etc, etc, etc.
There's always the issue that people who are pissed off are the ones that talk, but they did sound pretty grim.

Second, and better news, I've been measuring our house. All of the apartments seem to be measured in square feet, but I have no reference to compare that with. So I measured all the rooms in the house (downstairs in the house actually, and then multiplied by 2 - it's got to be about the same upstairs as it is downstairs) and it came to (very about) 1200 square feet. Given that the larger 3 bedroom apartments we've been looking at are in the region of 1500 square feet, that looks pretty good.

US Embassy

I've completed my (20 page) H-1b (or maybe that's H1-b) form, and sent it off, with all the accompanying blurb (photocopy of passport, publications, degree certificates, etc) . Then I phone the US Embassy in London, on their extraordinarily expensive phone line (£1.20 / minute). The call cost £12 (although I had to phone twice, because the first time you get an answering service that tells you that you have to have your passport number).

So, I'm off to the US embassy in London in August to have my fingerprints taken (they said that I have to ensure I don't have any cuts or blisters on my index fingers on the day - hmmm... shall I cut my fingers today? No, I'll wait until tomorrow) and my retinas scanned and my tongue printed and my DNA sampled. Or some combination of those. S has to come too, but A & D don't - we just have to take pictures of them.

Buying antiques

Someone suggested that I buy a lot of antiques. Given that Corporation of Future Employment are going to pay for me to move my furniture, they suggested that I should buy a lot of expensive antiques, put them into my house, and claim them as my own, then CFE will pay for them to be moved to the US, and I sell them to gullible Americans who are impressed by their European charm.

It could all go horribly wrong in so many ways though - I can just imagine "Oh, Chippendale is so 2000".

Earthquakes!

I came across a page with information on earthquakes that had happened in the last 24 hours or week, including RSS feeds, so that when there's an earthquake, it appears in my email program. I started off with everything above magnitude 2.5, but there were too many of them happening in Southern California, and that made me nervous. So I changed my RSS feed to M5 or above, and that was much better.

Just Google It

Got an email from Alex at The MI Group. Corporation of Future Employment had sent them some details, but had missed something out (home address, and email address), so they stuck my name in Google, and sent me an email.

Which made me think about all the times I've met people at reunions / weddings / funerals / random events, and they say stuff like "I always wondered what happened to you". And I wonder why they didn't type my name into Google.

In fact, I know how many people have typed my name into Google, because I run a Google Adwords advert. Google adwords are the ads that appear on the right when you type different words into Google. You specify the words, the price you want to pay, and a few other things, and should someone type those words in, your advert will appear. (There are a couple of other extra clever things - Google holds a little auction each time, and whoever is willing to pay the most for their advert gets their advert to appear. But this can be overridden by the popularity of the advert - so if your advert is more popular, it appears more often.) Anyway, I set up a Google advert so that if you type my name into Google, an advert appears, saying "that's my name!" or something similarly inane. (Google don't charge you if the person doesn't click on it.) And because Google reports the number of people that are shown the ad, and the number that click on it, I know how often my name is typed into Google.

Anyway, you are expecting me to tell you how many people have searched for my name. Trouble is that one of the criteria Google uses to display an ad is how interesting it is, and they judge how interesting it is, by how many people click on it. It seems that my ads were so boring that no one clicked on them. Google said (effectively) "Your ads are crap, and we hate them. But if you pay us more, we'll show them anyway." So I've had to up my payment to 10c, each time someone clicks on them.

I did just type my name into Google, and an ad for Amazon appeared.

Moving Stuff

I rang up Brian, at Corporation of Future Employment, who is in purchasing, to ask about how our stuff gets moved. I had a vision of someone a little like, well, imagine a standard vision of someone in purchasing (maybe I've been altered by my experience). But Brian wasn't like that "It's GREAT to speak to you" he said (don't you love Americans? I really was convinced that Brian did think it was great to speak to me. Maybe it was.)

I had sent Brian an email a day or two before this, and he said he had checked out with other people that I was real, and who I said I was, and stuff like that. He told me that it was 'very simple'. He phones up a company called The MI Group , they send a big lorry around to our house, put all our stuff on it, put it on a boat, and send it across the Atlantic. He then writes them a cheque.

One rather nice part of the deal is that we aren't allowed to pack our stuff. Oh no no no. Then it wouldn't be insured. So they have to do it all.

One thing Brian didn't know, and no one I've spoken to seems to know, is how long it will take the boat, with all our stuff, to get across the Atlantic (and possibly through the Panama canal and up the Pacific too).

Big Mac Index

I decided to try to get around the problem of the exchange rate, and how much cash I would have lying around, by using the Big Mac Index, which was developed by The Economist magazine. Basically, they say, never mind what the real exchange rate is, compare the cost of a Big Mac in the currencies, and that tells you the real exchange rate - i.e. what you can buy.

Trouble is, the last update to the Big Mac index was in January, and the dollar has dropped since then. Although they said that the £ was overvalued by about 5%. (Does that mean that I'll have 5% more money than before, or 5% less. Well, I'll have the same amount as before, but will it feel like 5% more or less? I can never work that out).

However, it does tell me what a Big Mac costs in the US in January: $3.15, and that probably hasn't changed. But (being a person of high moral standing) I have no idea what a Big Mac costs in the UK. What I do know is that in January, it cost the equivalent of $3.32 in pounds. And

So, off to the Universal Currency Converter, which tells me that on the 15th of January, a dollar was worth 56.2p. So a Big Mac must cost about 3.32 * 56.2 = £1.86.

At the perceived exchange rate 1 pound is therefore worth 3.15/1.86 = $1.69, and 1 dollar is worth 1.86/3.15 = 59p. So, when I ask Google what $1000 is worth in dollars today it tells me it's £530. But what it will feel like (which is more important) is £590.

Hurrah! I've just talked myself into a pay rise! (Or raise, I should say now).

H-1b Form

I'm filling out my H-1b form, which is the check that I am not some sort of bad person, I suppose, for American immigration. It's 21 pages long, and asks questions about things like where my grandparents were born, and what there citizenship was (even Mum's super genealogical database couldn't answer that one for sure).

There's several questions about bad things I might have done. I'm going to work on the assumption that most of those either (a) haven't been discovered, or (b) were discovered so long ago that the records have been lost, due to the efficiency of our public service computer system.

It asked for any distinguishing marks. As Frank Zappa once put it "One of my legs is shorter than the other, and both of my feets too long."

Signing things

Yesterday, I handed in my notice at University of Current Employment. Which was a bit of a profound thing to do. People advise you write all sorts of things in resignation letters, but I just opened my previous one (sent in 2001), changed the date, and the person it was too, printed it and re-signed it. It just says "I'm resigning. Thanks." To the point.

I sent off my signed contract to Corporation of Future Employment, but I got an email from them this morning saying I'd forgotten to sign the moving stuff agreement, and asking if there were a problem. Nope, I'd got overexcited about the idea of signing and sending the contract, and so I'd missed it out of the big piles of pieces of paper to sign and send back. So, this afternoon, I'll be off to the Post Office, to find out about DataPost (or whatever it's called nowadays).

Driving Test

I've realised that on becoming a resident of California, I'm going to have to take a driving test. There seem to be three parts to it - knowledge, vision and driving. I've been trying to drive as if I'm taking a driving test for the last day or two - no holding the steering wheel with your knee while trying sticking one arm out of the window and lighting a cigarette with the other.

The hardest thing is trying not to cross over my hands. I haven't tried not to do that since I last took a driving test.

I also took the Driving Knowledge Tutorial and scored 20/23. Dunno what the pass mark is though.

Dollar falling, salary not?

I'm trying to understand how much money we'll have floating around when we move. But the dollar has been collapsing against the pound (and maybe against other things too). Naturally, when one is offered a post in a foreign country, one converts to one's own currency units. Well, since I was offered the job (couple of weeks ago), it's now £2100 less than it was. So it feels like I'm not going to get as much money. Of course, the number of loaves of bread I can buy with that salary is unchanged, so I am getting as much money. But then it makes me wonder how much money I was getting in the first place.

It all seems too arbitrary to me.

Further Reading

I've been reading Living and Working in America and Living in the USA. Both books had some useful pointers and information in them, but there was a fair amount of chaff in both of them to sort through.
Living and working in America, I found the less useful - it's written by a non-American, which I thought would make it better - the author would have a better idea of what's weird about Americans. Despite the title, a lot of it was about holidaying in America; it suggested that everyone gets two weeks holiday a year, and you might be able to get three if you save it up. But hey! We're not Americans! (Or we wouldn't be reading the book.) Hence, we get sensible amounts of holiday. Despite being revised pretty recently, it suggested that we go to the World Trade Centre to buy theatre tickets, and reminded the reader to cancel the coal deliveries before they left. It also assumed rather more knowledge about US geography than I had, it said things like "From the Midwest to Baltimore, it gets very cold in winter". Now, I can look up Baltimore on a map, but I can't type "Midwest" into Google maps and find out where it is (although it just dawned on me I could use Wikipedia).
Living in the USA I found more useful. It was written by an American, but an American with a fairly enlightened view of what people who aren't Americans think of America. It sometimes seemed to be unsure who it was written for - (almost) saying that "Americans live in houses. In cities. They drive cars." But other times using words I didn't know (flatware, for example, I've just had to look up.)

Both books had trouble with the internet and email - these have affected so many things so fundamentally that it's hard to slot them into the book, but this is what the authors (understandably) have tried to do. LIWIA suggested that you use email to contact people "send an email, and you'll often have a reply the next morning" - No!. Neither book mentioned things like craigslist as a source of ads, although LITU mentioned ebay.


Finally, both books had mistakes, which a moderately decent proofreader should have spotted. LITU suggested that there were three square feet to the square metre. (It's closer to 10. Some people are going to be shocked by the size of their new apartments.)

Developments ...

Spoke to head of department today, at University of Current Employment about having either a visiting or an honorary position. Apparently there's a difference between the two - honorary seems to be slightly harder to get, so that must be better.
Have emailed Future Employer Corporation today about starting dates, but no response as yet.

The Cat

Got a quote from Jets4Pets for moving the cat from Manchester Airport to LAX. (I call it LAX now, like a native). It seems that the cat has to go through Heathrow, and therefore might take longer to arrive than us - which seems like a good thing. Adding a cat to the mixture of two adults, two 4 year olds, luggage, etc seems to be just a bit too much.

Quote was £598. Still, Future Employer will pay $1000 towards miscellaneous moving expenses, and that's for moving the cat.