You're so money...

I've had the pleasure of gaining some understanding of how confusing taxes are when you're an expat. There are specific residency rules for California, the US and the UK - depending on the number of days you work in a certain country you're eligible to pay certain taxes, etc. The bonus is that I get out of doing my taxes for two years! Woo!

I'm heading to London for 3 weeks starting the 13th, and I'm going to get started opening the various bank accounts I'll need. My current bank doesn't have any European branches, so I'll be setting up a US account and a UK account with a bank that does. I will be paid in US$ (pray for a strong dollar!) and will then have to transfer money between accounts whenever I get paid. This should get interesting, with my luck dealing with banks lately. (For those who missed it, when I was in the UK last time, my bank turned off ATM access to all UK ATMs 3 days before I left even though I'd told them I was leaving, and took over a week mailing me a new card. I was able to withdraw cash if I went into a bank branch and asked them to do a cash advance against the credit card portion, but found this out Saturday at 3pm in a small English town where banks didn't open again until Monday morning and had already checked into a B&B that didn't take credit cards. Grrrr.)

Complimentary customer service... for a fee

Hank and I are jet-setting a fair bit before we move in September. We're heading to Kentucky next week for 5 days to visit Hank's family (and I'm hoping to taste some really excellent BBQ!). I'll be in London for work/flat-hunting from July 12 - Aug 3. Although Hank is invited to come with me to look for flats, I think he's opting out of the trip. I mean, being cramped into uncomfortable plane seats for 10 hours to be hauled around house-hunting just to fly back 10 hours and then have to do the flight all over again in less than a month - seriously, I just cannot understand why he wouldn't want to go! :P

Most of you are aware that I test software for a living, and let me just say that for my recent efforts attempting to book a ticket with British Airways, I found a few doozie bugs and was charged $20 extra for my efforts. (I'm kinda used to getting paid for that skill, so this was a shocker.) I was getting an error message on the booking page attempting to pay for the ticket, so I called two different help lines, and after an eternity on hold, spoke with a woman who told me to try it with a different browser. Sure, no problem - I went through it, still happens. She tried it on her system, and found a ticket $500 more than what I was seeing. I tried it again on my system, and this time, the SFO - LHR ticket price showed up as $-41!! Somehow it does seem fitting that airlines should pay you to fly on them. The return ticket price turned out to be the full price of the round-trip ticket plus the missing $41. So it still came out to be the same price.

No, it didn't let me 15 one-way tickets.
Yes, BA did charge me $20 to book the ticket with the "helpful" website support person to book the ticket because their website sucks. Gotta love customer service.