Friday, June 23, 2006

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.)

Sunday, June 04, 2006

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.