UK for beginners

Life is complicated

2007-01-29T15:20:00.000Z

In this country you need a PhD in Law only to manage your household. You need it order to deal with you broadband provider who does not provide what it should, or your gas or electricity supplier who bills you three times more what they should, or with the TV licensing office who wants to be paid twice, or with the car insurance company ecc... the list is a very long one. Life seems to be very complicated in the UK. Almost everyone I know is obsessed by one of this domestic issues. And if you are unlucky and have to deal with two of them at the same time you feel really miserable.

I had tea with a few friends today. The conversation we had triggered me writing this post:

I have just had a problem with British Gas that has lasted 4 months, they were billing me for the wrong meter. It has taken me 4 months to convince them I was right and they were wrong. Four months in which I have received many threatening letters, about cutting the supply, going to court, sending report to credit agencies bla, bla, bla.

Another one bought a TV. The shop made a mistake in his address in the bill and now "TV Licensing" is accusing him to have another TV in that address for which he does not pay license. It is almost impossible to make them understand the error. The thing is that if you ignore them they will report to the credit agencies.

Another one has been paying a broadband provider for 5 months and he does not have broadband yet.

Another one has had his boiler broken since September and the thing is that he is paying a service that is supposed to come immediately and repair it.

Another one is still being billed for a mobile phone contract that terminated a few months ago.

Another one is migrating to Australia.

Everybody I can think of has or has had a similar problem recently with some provider or supplier. They seem to have the right to threat and menace you. The starting point is that they are right and you are wrong and show the contrary if you can. Everything is a struggle.

I know many people leaving abroad, in Italy, Spain, France, Switzerland, Germany... and they seem not to be obsessed by things like these. Life seems to be simpler elsewhere, they seem to work and live their lives without having to write infinite letters to companies to prove they are innocent.

Average household spending

2007-01-24T13:28:00.000Z

The National Statistics office last week published the 2005/06 Family Spending report. It is a very interesting document that tells a lot about us, our habits, with what we are prepare to spend large sums of money and with what we ware not. For example, the average family in the UK spends £443 a week. We spend most in transport, £62 a week whilst we spend £45 a week in food (remember that his figures are per household). If you have a look to the detailed document you will see that we spend more in take-aways (£3.80) than in fresh fruit and vegetables (£3.40) which tells a lot about our eating habits.

I wonder how much we spend on crisps. Last summer, when I was waiting to take a plane back from a touristic resort in Spain, I went to buy some crisps to the bar. The waiter, quite bewildered, told me he had finished them. He said he used to work in a bar at a section of the airport where planes mainly flew to Germany and that there, a box of crisps (whatever that is) lasted for a month. This had been his first day in that section of the airport where planes mainly flew to the UK. When he arrived that morning there were 30 boxes of crisps in the bar and he had already finished them by 2pm!!. We definitely eat more crisps than the Germans do.

Hot water tap and cold water tap

2007-01-22T22:48:00.000Z

One of the first things that shocks the tidy new comer in the UK is how difficult is to wash his hands: he has to rapidly move his hands from under a tap yielding cold water to under another one yielding boiling water!. New comer, do not think we are behind the rest of the world in tap-wise technology. There is a reason for not having only one tap providing cold and hot water mixed in order to provide a comfortable temperature: bacteria.

This is the reason to this two-tap thing I have been given: In the case a boiler does not work properly resulting in the water in the tank being warm rather than being very hot, some kind of dangerous bacteria can grow in that tank. Now, if this is the case at some premises where the hot water carries more pressure than the cold water and both circuits (hot and cold) are connected at some point through a mixing tap, hot water carrying bacteria can run into the cold water circuit, back into the mains and spread to neighbours.

All this sounds fine BUT there is a question I would like to know the answer: why is it that this risk of bacteria contamination seems not to exist in many other countries I have visited (for example Germany, France, Switzerland, Italy, Spain)??? I can assure you that washing your hands there is much easier and is burn risk-free.

National Identity Card

2007-01-19T16:35:00.000Z

In the UK, demonstrating that you are who you say you are is a bit more difficult that in other countries. You will have experienced it yourself if you have ever tried to open a bank account in this country. In other non anglo-saxon countries is enough to show you National Identity Card, a document, guaranteed by the State, that has your name, picture and a number that is unique to you and is called the National Identity Number . In the UK there is no such document, the funny thing is its absence is in the sake of privacy!.

Now, let me explain why I say it is funny than in the sake of privacy there is no NID. There is no such thing as privacy in this country. Let me illustrate this with a few examples:

in this country there are three agencies that keep a record of all your financial movements (i.e. you bank is obliged to communicate them your credit card balance periodically, your gas supplier will immediately tell them if you have not payed a bill...), you can see your records at this agencies, for example here (paying of course);
in London (and I guess other big cities as well) they control whether a car has payed the "congestion charge" by recording with cameras the traffic in all streets. Then they have software that identifies vehicles and licence plates and checks in some database if that vehicle has payed the charge or not.
newspapers here do not hesitate to publish the picture of suspects of crimes or frauds. Some of them are found not guilty, but only after their picture and name is known by everybody.

I am not in favour of the State having too much information about the citizens but I find incoherent not having a NID here, where the State already knows everything about you.

Note: In the UK Passports and driving licenses can be used as proof of identity but not everybody has them (only if you drive or have travelled abroad you will have them) and they are not always sufficient.

Toilets and bars

2007-01-18T16:32:00.000Z

Anyone who has visited London (and I guess the rest of the UK is the same) will have had the bad experience of going to a cafeteria or bar to have something to drink and/or eat and when asking where the toilets were you were told that they have no toilets!

Well, in this country it is not compulsory for an establishment that does not sell alcohol to have a toilet for customers, even if they serve food!!. Does anybody understand that?

I gather that the Brits look at it from the other way around: if they sell alcohol they must have a toilet (of course!, they drink liters and liters of beer). But, shouldn't you be able to wash your hands and have a pee when you go somewhere to drink or eat something?. I would like to hear your opinions on the subject.

Facilities for wheelchairs.

2007-01-14T18:34:00.000Z

Today I visited a workshop in an industrial park. The facade of the building is just big enough to have a door and parking space for one car. We drove there but could not park in front of the workshop because the parking was for disabled people only. When I asked the chap at the workshop he just sighed "regulations". We got into the workshop: a cramped space full of machines with very narrow corridors in between them (in some of them you have to walk sideways to get through). The amazing thing was the toilet: a fully prepared one for a wheelchair. No way a wheelchair can get to the door of that toilet through those corridors!!! When I asked the guy again he just said the word again: regulations.

I have always strongly supported having facilities for disabled people but it is ridiculous they make this guy with a tiny workshop have them.

When I came back I had a look at the tube map of "Transport for London" web page (www.tfl.gov.uk/tfl/pdfdocs/colourmap.pdf). There are 365 tube stations in London of which only 83 are prepared for wheelchairs. Of these 83 only 7 are in "zone 1" and 38 are in the Greenwhich area where the tube is new. According to the map, none of the major London train stations (Victoria, Kings Cross, Paddington and Liverpool Street) have facilities for wheelchairs.

Straight walls

2007-01-07T16:55:00.000Z

Can anyone answer me why in this country there are so many new walls which are not straight?. I have visited plenty of apartments in which there is not a single wall which is vertical and no two walls that are parallel. In many of them you could not even hang a picture frame because of the curvature of the wall (the frame being flat you allways leave big gaps between the wall and frame). Come on, it is not that difficult, the technology is there since many years ago: the spirit level!. Or is it that builders in this country have not yet learned to use one? Framemakers have!

Huge plugs

2006-12-26T16:50:00.000Z

Can someone hint me why in the UK we need plugs at least twice as big as those in continental Europe?. Yeah, I know, there is a fuse in them that adds safety. But then the question is, why they do not need the fuse on the continent?.

No switches or plugs in bathrooms.

2006-12-26T16:43:00.000Z

Everyone who has visited the UK will remember the first time they entered a bathroom and could not find the light switched. Some of us spent quite some time feeling a bit embarrassed looking for the bloody switched and thinking: "come on, I cannot be such a dumb, it has to be somewhere". Well, it wasn't anywhere, was it!. They are outside the bathroom. The reason comes from the very early times of electricity in houses about a hundred years ago. At that time, the insulation materials used to protect the cables were not as advanced as now and a bit of humidity was likely to produce a shortcut. Shouldn't the regulations catch up with technology?.

Intro to this blog

2006-12-26T15:33:00.000Z

The UK is a great country with great people. A wonderful place to be. I would dare say one of the most important cultural centres of the western world. Here, the production of world class theatre, opera, music, literature and scientific research is stunning. However, these noble activities are not everything Brits are up to. Much of the energy they don't spend in the subjects mentioned above they use it in trying to show the rest of the world they are different, specially different from continental Europeans. It is enough to have a look at the newspapers to see that they love contrasting taste, laws, regulations, news, anything with continental Europe. However it is not their laws or taste for food or clothes or not having the euro or driving on the left that makes them different. The difference is somewhere deeper in the cultural roots and can be appreciated in the way they have to understand what surrounds them. This difference is reflected on almost everything from common sense to written laws resulting in situations and regulations difficult to understand to the newcomer or traveller to whom they will look absurd. It is the aim of this blog to bring out some of these "absurdities" and comment them. On each of them there will be many different points of view, all of them valid and at the end what looked absurd might look clear as water... or may be not.

Have your say

2006-12-26T01:00:00.000Z

If you want to comment one of the entries you can post a comment to that particular entry. If you want to have your own say about anything related to the UK post a comment here. Your contribution is very much appreciated.