Suttons Go To London

It was the strangest thing to drop Jen off at the airport today. Probably more strange for her since she knows where she is going, and by that I mean she controls her destiny. From an airport she could be going anywhere, so when I drop her off there, that is where she has disappeared to. This probably doesn’t make any sense, but that’s why it is surreal. The reality part is that now the house is quiet and empty. The closet is only half full, the bathroom counter isn’t littered with her stuff, and I have this strange feeling as my best friends and built in social life has gone away and it is now up to me to follow. I already miss her terribly, but know that this is just a step toward a much greater thing we will do together. At the same time, I am anxious to go check out her photos and entries once she gets there.

in Phoenix. But it wasn’t easy. We “called ahead” to California Pizza Kitchen only to get there, have them “lose” our call ahead info and then make us wait 45+ minutes for a table while every single other person was seated as well as those who came in 20 minutes later. (They couldn’t figure out how to push some tables together.) So we turned to leave and magically our table was “almost ready.” Forget the details, but know it was a pretty crappy experience for overpriced mediocre cuisine. We still left. I’m sure CPK isn’t going out of business over this, but I won’t be there if I can help it.

Well it looks like this is actually going to happen. I have a flight scheduled for tomorrow evening at 7:30pm. The best part is that it is a direct flight from here to Heathrow in London. THAT is good news. I start on Monday, but only for a few hours, then it is off to hunt for a house. In 18 hours, I’ll be leaving….. I’m going to miss the dogs, our friends and family, but most of all, Michael. But, he will join me in a few weeks, so I’m just going to focus on that!

Jen and I have been talking about this all for some time now. How to do a gap year without making it a financial and professional setback. How to make it last more than a year. We were envious of all of the stories we would read about couples and friends and even individuals who would throw caution into the wind and set off into the world. I was sold. In fact, I was ready to go, but there was a problem. Jen is a smart and reasonable woman. She realized that while our plan had a very immediate and high level of gratification, it set us back and caused a bit of sacrifice.

At the time I was a bit frustrated by here sensibility, but now I am thankful for it because it forced us to create a better plan. Let’s not just visit a bunch of places over the course of a year, let’s go live on a different continent and see it while we immerse into a new culture. Yeah, it seems pretty simple, but as you can tell from Jen’s plight, it isn’t. In fact I would say that it requires a lot more persistence and perseverance than most people normally exhibit.

So, now here we are, about to make that first step towardssomething we’ve really wanted. Here’s to it being worth the wait…

Finally. Finally. Finally. Got the entry clearance today. What an ordeal (for an extremely impatient person). Hopefully I leave on Saturday, but even if I don’t, I AM leaving at some point soon. It still doesn’t seem real, but I’m guessing that reality will hit me once I have been trapped on a steel tube hurtling over the ocean for 10 hours.

So I got an e-mail from London saying that it appears that my visa has been approved!!! It isn’t in my hand yet, so I don’t believe it, but supposedly they are overnighting it for delivery tomorrow! That means I will be in London in a few days, with Michael behind me a few weeks later.

Well it has been a long haul, but it looks like for better or worse, everything should be decided in the next day or two.

This blog will be commemorative of our (hopefully) pending move from Phoenix, AZ to London UK. So this first post is going to be all about how I got to today.

The middle of last year brought rumblings of “rightsizing” all through the mortgage company at which I work. Being the exceptional superstar employee that I am, I wasn’t particularly worried about this until the day in November my boss walked in and said that despite my exceptional superstar performance for the past 2 1/2 years, I was being asked to either leave with severance, or take 2 steps back. My knee jerk reaction was to take the severance and roll around in my own misery -AKA play video games and watch What Not Wear for 8 hours per day - but luckily, my helpful husband Michael convinced me that would not be a good way to leverage my talents for a long term career search. So I stayed, and started looking for international jobs within the company.

I looked into nearly 50 jobs. 50. Jobs. And every hiring manager said essentially the same thing, we love you, you would be a great fit, but there are 20 more of you right here who we can meet and touch, and so what what makes you SO special that we should spend a fortune and a million dollars importing you? Ummmmm…. I am an exceptional superstar?

So I reached my last job posting and decided that if it didn’t work out, I was going to take a long break from looking overseas. The 5am interviews and the constant rejection were starting to bring me down. I also applied for a newly vacated management position here in Phoenix. I applied for the London job on January 14th, 2008, and was given the brush off with the same line listed above. Since this was my self imposed last shot, I pushed back a little, got the interview, got the second interview (both at 5am), and subsequently got the job offer on February 27th, 2008. 2 days later I got offered the local management position, which I turned down (although I ended up doing the job for them for almost 3 months(how’s that for foreshadowing)).

Then came the craziness. We started the visa / work permit application process on February 29th. My new boss called HR in London and asked them to point us in the right direction. They responded March 5th, asking for my CV and job description, which they forwarded on to their people in legal for review. On March 11th, the legal people (who I later came to realize are in fact a vendor legal immigration company) said they lost the paperwork, or possibly never got it, and we would have to start from scratch. We didn’t hear a word from them until March 18th, at which point they said they had assigned my case, and someone would contact me within 4 days to talk about moving forward.

This is a good place for me to interject that a wise, forward thinking person would have started to see a trend right here, and would have incorporated this into her expectations about the future. Since I am apparently neither, am still frustrated and impatiently waiting.

At the very end of the 4th business day, which ended up being March 26th due to some holiday, the visa people asked me to fill out some forms and send them back. Which I did about 30 minutes later. Then we waited and waited until April 1st when my new boss told me it would be easier to import C4 into the country than to get me there. At least he has a good sense of humor. And then on April 4th, the new boss took charge and gave them a timeline. 4 agonizingly long weeks of waiting, and I had myself a work permit.

Now I realize there are people out there who wait months and years for their permits to come through, but we’re talking about me right now. This process was supposed to take 48-72 hours. And the absolute longest was 4 weeks. So of course, on the 1st day of the 5th week, the permit gets approved.

So now we reach the final step. I go to an application support center for my biometrics (fingerprints and photographs). They British Government will use this to determine if I am a terrorist, which I am not. They send this to the arbiter of my entire future, some random guy at the British Consulate in Los Angeles. AEF gets a package containing pretty much my whole life (fingerprints, passport, bank statements for every account, every personal detail, every work detail, etc). And makes the final decision, without meeting me, as to my level of worthiness. This process of decision, according to the Consulate’s website states that 70% of their application are decided within 24 hours, and 90% are decided within 5 business days. 99% are processed within 4 weeks. Please refer to my earlier line about being wise and forward thinking. So this whole thing was submitted to the Consulate on May 14th. And here we sit on May 28th. Sigh.

The good news is I had a bunch of time off from work, so I have been able to hone my MarioKart Wii skills. The bad news is that the people at the Consulate have built themselves an impenetrable fortress. There is literally NO WAY to get in touch with these people. I don’t know for a fact that they have even started the process yet. The only way you can even talk to a vendor that supports their “customer service center” is to pay a $12 fee to talk to this jughead who can only repeat the same 4 phrases over and over. I could teach a goldfish to do that for free. Anyway, she says I have to wait 10 business days before I can call back to “talk” to her again. For $12 more. So that is tomorrow.

Every time a truck drives by our house, my heart jumps a little because I think it is the UPS guy bringing my visa. Michael says I am even better at sounding the alert than the dogs.