Monday on Mars

Life is like a maze, don’t you think, as you walk down different paths hoping to make progress and reach your goal, you find that you continually walk straight into a dead end, walls all around except the way back, until you take a different route as you press on toward your original goal.

Can you believe that I am still struggling with my solicitors and mortgage company to pay off my mortgage that should have been closed out 10 days ago. I have spent endless time on the phone at national rate because I am here and they are in the UK, trying to help them to resolve the issues. Trouble is with companies these days, is they cock up then try and pass the buck, it seems that no one will ever hold their hands up and say sorry, we made a mistake. At the end of last week, my mortgage company told me that they had received a cheque to pay my mortgage but I needed to wait 5 working days for the cheque to clear funds. So, I emailed my solicitor on Friday asking her to check on the transaction, as I was not entirely happy with it. Today I called the mortgage company in total 3 times, only to be told that they had not, in fact got a cheque from the solicitor, just a letter regarding a cheque. Then I got an email form my solicitor asking me to see if I had any strange entries on my bank account. Now I already new what this was for, it’s because my solicitor had erroneously paid all money to me instead of part to me and part to my mortgage. Only now are they realising that they have massively ……..up! She tells me to save time and pay the mortgage company off directly, so I ring the mortgage company again and try to do this, they tell me I can only do this by paying them a cheque or making a telegraphic transfer by going to my bank offices. I can’t go to the offices, because they are about 800 air miles away. If I pay by cheque it will take about 10 days to fulfil the transaction, which I don’t favour as I get interest added daily on the account. She also tells me to pay by BACS over the Internet, which I reply this is also not possible because there is a maximum transaction limit of £10,000 on personal accounts. I made a call to my bank and after spending at least quarter of an hour in another automated system, I spoke to a lady in India about the problem I am having trying to pay my mortgage off can I please arrange a telegraphic transfer, she says certainly I can, if I go to my banks offices! I try to calmly ask her if she could pop over the my banks offices and have a little word with them, and of course this sounds absurd to her, and I am able to clarify my point to her that neither can I. She puts me back on hold so that she can ask her supervisor if it is ok for her to put me through to my branch. Great I think, now I will be able to sort this out. Unfortunately not, because for 3 attempts the branch is busy and cannot take my call. The nice Indian lady tells me I’ll have to call back later. Has she really not been listening to me? So I can neither pay the mortgage off nor return the money to the solicitor at any great speed. I get the message I’m on my own with this one; even though I pay other people to take care of it for me.

Finally I got an apology from the solicitor for their mistake and the inconvenience it has caused me, I also had assurances that I would be reimbursed for the overpayment I would have to make for the added interest. I wonder how true to this they will be? So I now have posted a cheque to the mortgage company, which will take at least 3 days from Czech to UK, then it will take about 6 working days to go through the banks system, in the mean time the normal payment date of my mortgage will have come and gone so I can expect a letter telling me that I have defaulted on my mortgage payments, yippee!

The next annoyance I had today was the response I got from Mid Kent Water regarding money they owe me. Last week they emailed me telling me they had sent a cheque to my Czech address on the 28^th September, when I chased them today they tell me they sent me the cheque on the 6^th October, So the question is, why lie in the first email, surely they know the difference between send a cheque last week or this week, they must have records of such things?

Further to this, O2 has still not reconnected my UK mobile after erroneously cutting me off due to an error at their end, which they hope to resolve soon?

So, back to the business at hand here in the Czech Republic, Petra is getting a good response to her CV at several companies through the agencies. She has a couple of interviews tomorrow and one on Wednesday. One of the things I must do if I wish to stay in the Czech Republic permanently is register with the foreign police, within 30 days of arriving, but to do this, I must have one missing piece of paperwork that is Foreigners health insurance. So we went to buy this but find that as usual with most insurance it has a list of exclusions as long as your arm. These would include sporting activity! Any of you who know me personally, will know that I like to be active and will regularly cycle, run, swim, occasionally play sport, or skate and like to go skiing once or twice a year, so having sporting activity excluded makes the insurance as useful as a chocolate fire guard! So we asked for an insurance upgrade, to something that includes the exclusions. This is available we were pleased to hear, as long as I go to a doctor and have a medical. So now we have to go for the medical, to get the insurance, to enable me to get the residency permit. It’s reassuring to know they are as fucked up in the CR as we are in the UK. Once I have the residency permit, it will be easier to do many other things, like open a bank account or obtain a work permit.

We have tried a second language school, but they too were full for this term, I can enrol in February if I want to. I really wanted to get a course straight away though, so I will continue looking.

not sure how many of you will have made it to the end of this post, it is rather long.