Moving to the U. K. — Clash of Bureaucracies

I received a packet of forms to fill out today relative to my criminal record, my housing situation, my tax status (in the U.K.), and so on. It makes me want to yell out the window, “But I don’t have a Taxpayer Identification Number! (Not for the U.K.)”
 
The storage garage is relatively orderly. We have a few boxes to close up, my clothing to distribute into transportable divisions, three estimates for shipping to obtain (Glasgow will reimburse the lowest), and my renegade pocket notebook to recapture.
 
The notebook — a Miquelrius, comparable to a Moleskine — fell out of my pocket on the Duke Shuttle bus on Monday. I called around about it Tuesday morning; no one seemed to know where it was. Margaret and I searched all over, to no avail. Today, I hopped on the Shuttle again, and asked the driver where I ought to look if I lost something on the bus. “What’s your name?” she demanded.
 
It turned out that she had found it, and was trying to get my attention as I stepped off the bus. When I didn’t hear ehr, she asked the other passengers if any of them knew me. One thought I was a Div School faculty member, so she gave him the notebook and told him to get it to me.
 
So today I went to every Div School office I could think of, to check to see whether the mystery passenger had brought my notebook there. No luck.
 
On my way back home on the Shuttle, I told the driver my tale of woe and intrigue, and she looked around on the bus. “You know that guy I gave the notebook to?” she hollered back at one passenger. Yes, she acknowledged, she knew him. He gave it to such-and-such a person at the Divinity School, someone I hadn’t seen in his office. I gave her my card, and asked her to give it to the notebook recipient; I emailed him myself, when I got off the bus. We’ll see what happens tomorrow.

2 thoughts on “Moving to the U. K. — Clash of Bureaucracies

  1. AKMA,
    I pray your transition to the UK goes without hitch. I think you’ve had enough to worry about so far. A smooth move would be nice.

    If you would like a few web 2.0 toys that might the transition easier, try Audioboo.fm With your iphone you can post great sounding audio messages. It’s a new blogging platform that integrates with Facebook and Twitter. I found this over the past few days.

    Also, as you will be shuffling papers, gathering confirmations, receipts, etc. Try JotNot for the iphone. It takes great pics of paper stuff and files them in the cloud. JotNot in combination with Evernote, allows you to store these jpg pics as text, which means you can search the text within the pictures of your documents as if they were text documents. If you tag them with a keyword, you can add more power to the searching.

    You could have taken snapshots of each page of your Moleskin and had them always available, searchable, and printable. I’m in the process of entering business cards and the copyright info in the front of research articles and books for later documentation.

    I hope this helps some,
    JA

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