Despite the silence we haven’t just been sleeping and cleaning out pantries. We’ve been battling with the finest British bureaucracy and visiting more of Polly’s relatives. The visiting is the more interesting part, mind. Which is why I’ll deal with it in another post.
While we managed to get Polly set up with the NHS easily, I had to spend time tracking down details of past residence before they’d accept me. Which is slightly better than Customs who won’t consider handing us National Insurance numbers until we’re either looking for work or have a job and have documentary evidence to prove the above. Hurrah.
But the best so far is HSBC, proving that the public service has competition in this field. We’ve been denied our money for 3 weeks now, having been told we need to provide address verification. This, of course, is problematic given they want bills with our name on, which we don’t have. Nor will they accept their correspondence or that of the NHS. They have agreed to accept documents from the NZ Electoral role, but we still need to track some down for Polly. Damnit. In the meantime they’ve managed to destroy our ATM cards but have sent out our credit (to NZ) and debit (only mine) cards despite insisting we’d have to pick them up from the branch. Now that’s service.
Maybe next week…
