7 ms·

I am an edge case

85 points by gnosis 16y ago

mbrubeck 16y ago
The worst thing was when I moved from the US to Canada one year, and from Canada to the US the next. Both years I had to file tax returns in both countries, and various amounts had to be prorated based on the number of days of the year that I was a Canadian resident. And my Canadian wages had to be converted to USD based on the exchange rates from each day I received a paycheck.... And yeah, none of my US banks or credit card companies could handle my Canadian address on their web sites.
- danbmil99 16y ago
  Moving from NYC to CA involves a bunch of state tax bullshit. Each state is so broke they have insanely aggressive collection policies, and acc. to my accountant they can end up both claiming > 11% of your income based on overlapping residency rules.
lionhearted 16y ago
Great post. By the way, I have the answer to this: > No credit I had the same problem because I avoided credit cards when I was younger because I thought it was a bad habit, and I was self-employed so I couldn't verify any salary. It meant I had no credit and I got rejected for low end credit cards - a yucky cycle. Eventually a smart bank manager I knew gave me a plan to fix this: I went into the bank and got a "secured loan" - what you'll do is deposit about $1000 into the bank (or whatever amount you want) and get a CD for it that you can't touch. It'll pay something like 2% in today's climate. Then you get a loan secured by that CD for something like 2.4% - seriously, the interest rate on a secured loan is very low because the bank has your CD sitting there and you can't get it... there's virtually no risk. Okay, now, have your loan set to auto pay so you don't have to worry about it. You'll get 12 "paid on time" records in the next year and it'll cost you very little. Actually, it's a little better than that even, because it's a different kind of credit from a credit card. Credit cards are "revolving", this sort of loan is something else... so it'll permanently boost your credit a little bit for the next 7 years until it falls off your record. I had no credit. Got a secured loan like this. 3 months later, was able to get a crappy credit card from Capital One, very low limit, high interest, no benefits. Just charged some small purchases to it and paid in full each month. After a perfect year between the secured loan and the Capital One card, was able to get an AMEX gold card with no limit on which was important because I was having business-related payments that'd sometimes be a lot in a short period of time. Also wound up getting two free one way international flights from the points from the card. So yeah - secured loan is the way to go. The difference you pay between the CD's interest rate and your loan interest rate is well worth it to have credit.
- hammerdr 16y ago
  My father did this for me while I was in high school. If you have the opportunity to do this for your kids, do it. It's a hundred dollar jump start to life.
- hugh3 16y ago
  Yeah, when I first moved to the US the bank offered me a "secured credit card" deal whereby I would lend them my money for no interest and they would lend some of it back to me at some nonzero rate. I told them that they could go fuck themselves, and if they wanted proof of my creditworthiness they can damn well phone up my bank in my home country and ask them about me. Four and a half years later I still have no US credit cards and no US credit rating. I haven't really found a need for it, though locals occasionally look shocked at the idea.
  - lionhearted 16y ago
    > Four and a half years later I still have no US credit cards and no US credit rating. I haven't really found a need for it, though locals occasionally look shocked at the idea. This might turn out to be very penny wise and pound foolish. Sooner or later you might want to buy a property to live in or for investment reasons, and oftentimes you'll only realize you want to buy a place six months or a year before you want to buy. That's not long enough to build a good credit rating to get a decent mortgage - you're very possibly throwing away thousands of dollars of your future money to save yourself... like $20 now. And you don't pay interest on a credit card unless you carry a balance - pay in full each month. I only spent $150 on a credit card once because it had excellent benefits and I got $600 of free airfare from that card. I've paid $0 in fees or carrying a balance besides that in my life, aside from that $20 for a secured loan. Why not build a credit score? - there's no real downside, it doesn't take long to do, and might make a big difference for you later.
    - Encosia 16y ago
      "No real downside" is only true if you have perfect discipline and no bad luck. If that were very common, credit wouldn't be such a phenomenally profitable industry. Betting on credit is like betting against the house in Vegas.
quant18 16y ago
The nice thing about living in Hong Kong is that most of these stupid edge cases have been sanded out of the system already. Probably because they doesn't just affect immigrants, but "local" people too (the 10% of the population who emigrated in the 80s, but kept their flats and bank accounts cuz they're intending to come back sometime). I've never had a problem with foreign mailing addresses, or my name being too long for the input field (like in Korea where they give you 4 characters max), or needing a citizen's ID number to complete transactions (you can use your passport number for literally everything from government forms down to supermarket loyalty cards), or any of that nonsense. It's always a rude reminder of "normal" to deal with businesses and government bureaux in other countries. Like "another Brian" said in the blog's comments, the third world isn't even the worst in this regard, cuz at least there you can rely on personal relationships, or at worst bribes. It's the less efficient countries of the first world, where clerks generally won't take bribes and don't care who your friend's daddy is, but will go through their triplicate forms at the speed they please (and make a series of blocking calls to you to clarify each piece of information when you don't fit into their check boxes), and close the office at 4 PM, client be damned.
sjs 16y ago
No need to quote chequing and cheque. Them words is real. Gotta love how Americans go against the grain by changing spellings, dropping letters, etc. Then they try to spin it like everyone else is odd for spelling it differently. We're on to you! ;-)
- alnayyir 16y ago
  "go against the grain" Right now on the front page there's a linguistics article stating that it was the British-English that diverged more, not the American version. So, let's talk who 'changed' when you drop received pronunciation.
  - weeksie 16y ago
    While 'going against the grain' might not be the correct way to phrase it, you have to reali[sz]e that the entire rest of the English speaking world spells things like that. England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, etc. . . As far as the divergence in spelling is concerned that's almost entirely due to Noah Webster who purposefully spelled things in a more Germanic way because he found the English spellings with the French influences to be distasteful.(1) [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noah_Webster#Blue_Backed_Speller http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noah_Webster#Blue_Backed_Spelle...
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
    - _delirium 16y ago
      It doesn't go against most of your point, but the reali[sz]e example in particular isn't Webster's fault or an example of U.S. divergence--- it used to be spelled -ize in the UK too, and didn't really shift completely until the past few decades. It's still the form preferred by the Oxford English Dictionary: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_spelling http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_spelling On the others, there's a bit more of a continuum than everyone using the British spellings, though I'll agree the Commonwealth probably tilts towards more similarity with the UK than with the US. But Canadian spelling, especially, aligns with U.S. usage in a lot of respects: it generally uses -ize rather than -ise endings ("realize", not "realise"), and sides with the Americans on a lot of specific one-off differences ("tire", not "tyre"), though it sides with the U.K. spellings on -our vs. -or ("colour", not "color").
rgrieselhuber 16y ago
I ran into stuff like this all the time when I lived in Japan. Governments and businesses have a long time to go before they catch up with the realities of globalization.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
cperciva 16y ago
No credit Not as much of a problem as you think it is. Canadian companies can pull US credit reports -- like your bank did -- and do so on a regular basis. Not so regular that every car salesman will know how to do it; but any large company will have figured out how to handle this, even if not everybody at the company knows that it's possible.
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btilly 16y ago
The one thing that I didn't hear which I expected to was confusion about whether forms should be month/day/year or day/month/year. Being a Canadian living in the USA, I never remember which is which in which place, and just want to use the ISO standard YYYY-MM-DD instead.
- kasterma 16y ago
  Monday: Mon(th)da(y)y(ear) Doesn't get much worse for a mnemonic, but works for me.
  - GFischer 16y ago
    That doesn't help the original post: he doesn't remember which is for the US and which is for Canada.
    - xiaoma 16y ago
      How about this? Monday is the 'merican mnemonic.
dublinclontarf 16y ago
On a similar note, I made a payment to my creditcard back home(from China) using SWIFT method of international payments(it's an interbank payment system). On the form there is a section to leave a mesasge or comment for the reciever. My credit cards co told me to put only my CC No. with no spaces or nothing else. Told my wife all this (wrote it down) and she went to make the payment (she's Chinese, it's just easier that she does this kind of thing, from a paperwork efficiency point of view. So of coarse she also puts my name after the card number. The next week I call the company, they can't find the payment, dissapeared into their system. POOF, gone. Will be spending the next few weeks making international calls to chase that one up. They're system is sooooo brittle.
dotBen 16y ago
Ok, how's this for an edge case... I'm a Canadian citizen who was born and lived in UK all his life who lives and works (legally) in the US for 4 years on a non-resident TN visa, I'm not allowed to be considered even a temporary resident in the US despite the fact I've lived here for 4 years, oh but I am considered resident for tax purposes (ie I pay tax here and do a US tax return - but no other residency benefits). When I arrive back in the country I have to say on my landing card that I'm temporally visiting the US and that I'm a resident of the United Kingdom. However, I don't pass the "residency test" of the UK as I've not lived there for 4 years. Technically I'm not resident of any country, which is kinda unsettling. And I'm 'temporally visiting the US' in that I drive out of the airport in the car that I own here and drive home to my apartment where I live with all my furniture and all my stuff in it. US Immigration finds it difficult to accept that I am a Canadian citizen (and have Canadian passport) yet I've never lived in Canada nor do I have a Canadian SSN nor do I have an address in Canada nor have I filed a tax return there (my father is Canadian but I was born in UK). I can't get any loans in the US as I don't have residency (although I don't really want a loan) and I can't buy property in the US, although I do have a US credit rating (I have a US SSN) and I managed to get a US credit card by already having an Amex when I lived abroad, and they carried the relationship over to US card (and started to add up my credit score against it). I believe I traverse a lot of terms and conditions for things like insurance because I'm not a resident and end up being considered in the same category as an illegal immigrant - where the companies want to take their money and turn a blind eye to lack of documentation. Except that I am in the US legally and do have documentation, I'm just not a resident. The visa I am on has no route to Green Card and so I will be in this limbo status indefinitely.
- cperciva 16y ago
  US Immigration finds it difficult to accept that I am a Canadian citizen (and have Canadian passport) yet I've never lived in Canada nor do I have a Canadian SSN nor do I have an address in Canada nor have I filed a tax return there (my father is Canadian but I was born in UK). There's an easy fix for that. Get a Social Insurance Number and file a tax return. As a non-resident with no Canadian-source income, your tax return should take less than 5 minutes to fill out, and you won't owe any taxes.
dalore 16y ago
Some of the comments are just wrong: > You have to live at least 6 months in the UK to open a bank account or apply for a credit card. I moved to the UK and this was not the case. It was difficult to open a bank account but not because you need to live here 6 months but because the banks require all sorts of identification which you normally don't have as a recent immigrant (stuff like proof of address).
sounddust 16y ago
As an American living in France, I can sympathize. Dealing with the bureaucracy here for any reason is a nightmare. One piece of advice for those in this situation: get the best American Express card that you can qualify for. It doesn't solve all your problems, but there are many cases where it magically just works. One example is ordering things online: AmEx is much more flexible about the shipping/billing address not matching up, and as a result I can often use it with a shipping and billing address from France with no problems. In addition, their customer service is fantastic, and they can often give you good advice or help you out when you get stuck in these situations.
- quant18 16y ago
  My favourite Amex customer service story is closely related to this expat edge-case theme. I was flying back to Hong Kong from a business trip in Japan. I'm a citizen of a third country, but live in HK. The Japan Airlines desk agent, and her manager, refused to issue me a boarding pass, because I didn't have a "re-entry permit" for Hong Kong. Japan and many other major countries have this concept for non-citizens, so I'm guessing whoever wrote the Japan Airlines "avoid Fooland Immigration Department fining us to pay for deporting our Barlandese passenger, for all values of Foo and Bar" checklist explained it badly and made it sound like a universal requirement or something. But in Hong Kong, there's no such thing as a re-entry permit --- they give you one visa, stamp it "Journey completed" when you arrive, and then let you come and go as you please.* This was in the days before WiFi in airports, so I couldn't just surf to gov.hk and show her the page that says "no re-entry visa required". And it was a Friday night so I couldn't phone the consulate either. At my wit's end, I called Amex --- my employer had paid for the ticket with an Amex card. Their customer service guy commiserated with me for a bit, and said he'd make a phone call. After a bit of a wait, a Cathay Pacific (major Hong Kong airline) manager showed up with a copy of the Hong Kong immigration regulations. Brilliant and creative solution --- and it forcefully demonstrated to me the value of filling customer-facing positions with creative and talented people rather than checklist-wielding drones who you don't screen as carefully as your "core function" staff. * Years later, the HK gov't changed the wording; now it's a tiny bit clearer that you don't need a re-entry permit: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:n5y5QqSqxSIJ:gia.info.gov.hk/general/200609/07/P200609070201_0201_18951.doc&cd=1&hl=zh-TW&ct=clnk&gl=hk http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:n5y5QqS...
jimbokun 16y ago
"The friendly folk at H&R Block had no idea how to handle my situation." I was shocked when I went to H&R block, and all they did was type data into the software on the screen in front of them. I realized I could do that myself, and have used TurboTax since, which has worked well for me needs. (I'm sure if I had more complex need, a real tax accountant would be important, but I don't think there is any case where H&R Block is the right choice.)
barrydahlberg 16y ago
I once had to visit a doctor in Japan. Everything went fine until they went to print me a prescription and tried to enter my name. After explaining that no, I can't provide my name in kanji they went ahead with it in English. My name broke the layout of the form on their screen and when the prescription was printed only the first half was shown because the rest ran off the side of the paper. I guess they don't get many foreigners showing up at the local family doctors clinic.

85 points by gnosis 16y ago

The worst thing was when I moved from the US to Canada one year, and from Canada to the US the next. Both years I had to file tax returns in both countries, and various amounts had to be prorated based on the number of days of the year that I was a Canadian resident. And my Canadian wages had to be converted to USD based on the exchange rates from each day I received a paycheck.... And yeah, none of my US banks or credit card companies could handle my Canadian address on their web sites.

danbmil99 16y ago
Moving from NYC to CA involves a bunch of state tax bullshit. Each state is so broke they have insanely aggressive collection policies, and acc. to my accountant they can end up both claiming > 11% of your income based on overlapping residency rules.

lionhearted 16y ago

Great post. By the way, I have the answer to this: > No credit I had the same problem because I avoided credit cards when I was younger because I thought it was a bad habit, and I was self-employed so I couldn't verify any salary. It meant I had no credit and I got rejected for low end credit cards - a yucky cycle. Eventually a smart bank manager I knew gave me a plan to fix this: I went into the bank and got a "secured loan" - what you'll do is deposit about $1000 into the bank (or whatever amount you want) and get a CD for it that you can't touch. It'll pay something like 2% in today's climate. Then you get a loan secured by that CD for something like 2.4% - seriously, the interest rate on a secured loan is very low because the bank has your CD sitting there and you can't get it... there's virtually no risk. Okay, now, have your loan set to auto pay so you don't have to worry about it. You'll get 12 "paid on time" records in the next year and it'll cost you very little. Actually, it's a little better than that even, because it's a different kind of credit from a credit card. Credit cards are "revolving", this sort of loan is something else... so it'll permanently boost your credit a little bit for the next 7 years until it falls off your record. I had no credit. Got a secured loan like this. 3 months later, was able to get a crappy credit card from Capital One, very low limit, high interest, no benefits. Just charged some small purchases to it and paid in full each month. After a perfect year between the secured loan and the Capital One card, was able to get an AMEX gold card with no limit on which was important because I was having business-related payments that'd sometimes be a lot in a short period of time. Also wound up getting two free one way international flights from the points from the card. So yeah - secured loan is the way to go. The difference you pay between the CD's interest rate and your loan interest rate is well worth it to have credit.

hammerdr 16y ago
My father did this for me while I was in high school. If you have the opportunity to do this for your kids, do it. It's a hundred dollar jump start to life.
hugh3 16y ago
Yeah, when I first moved to the US the bank offered me a "secured credit card" deal whereby I would lend them my money for no interest and they would lend some of it back to me at some nonzero rate. I told them that they could go fuck themselves, and if they wanted proof of my creditworthiness they can damn well phone up my bank in my home country and ask them about me. Four and a half years later I still have no US credit cards and no US credit rating. I haven't really found a need for it, though locals occasionally look shocked at the idea.
- lionhearted 16y ago
  > Four and a half years later I still have no US credit cards and no US credit rating. I haven't really found a need for it, though locals occasionally look shocked at the idea. This might turn out to be very penny wise and pound foolish. Sooner or later you might want to buy a property to live in or for investment reasons, and oftentimes you'll only realize you want to buy a place six months or a year before you want to buy. That's not long enough to build a good credit rating to get a decent mortgage - you're very possibly throwing away thousands of dollars of your future money to save yourself... like $20 now. And you don't pay interest on a credit card unless you carry a balance - pay in full each month. I only spent $150 on a credit card once because it had excellent benefits and I got $600 of free airfare from that card. I've paid $0 in fees or carrying a balance besides that in my life, aside from that $20 for a secured loan. Why not build a credit score? - there's no real downside, it doesn't take long to do, and might make a big difference for you later.
  - Encosia 16y ago
    "No real downside" is only true if you have perfect discipline and no bad luck. If that were very common, credit wouldn't be such a phenomenally profitable industry. Betting on credit is like betting against the house in Vegas.

quant18 16y ago

The nice thing about living in Hong Kong is that most of these stupid edge cases have been sanded out of the system already. Probably because they doesn't just affect immigrants, but "local" people too (the 10% of the population who emigrated in the 80s, but kept their flats and bank accounts cuz they're intending to come back sometime). I've never had a problem with foreign mailing addresses, or my name being too long for the input field (like in Korea where they give you 4 characters max), or needing a citizen's ID number to complete transactions (you can use your passport number for literally everything from government forms down to supermarket loyalty cards), or any of that nonsense. It's always a rude reminder of "normal" to deal with businesses and government bureaux in other countries. Like "another Brian" said in the blog's comments, the third world isn't even the worst in this regard, cuz at least there you can rely on personal relationships, or at worst bribes. It's the less efficient countries of the first world, where clerks generally won't take bribes and don't care who your friend's daddy is, but will go through their triplicate forms at the speed they please (and make a series of blocking calls to you to clarify each piece of information when you don't fit into their check boxes), and close the office at 4 PM, client be damned.

sjs 16y ago

No need to quote chequing and cheque. Them words is real. Gotta love how Americans go against the grain by changing spellings, dropping letters, etc. Then they try to spin it like everyone else is odd for spelling it differently. We're on to you! ;-)

alnayyir 16y ago
"go against the grain" Right now on the front page there's a linguistics article stating that it was the British-English that diverged more, not the American version. So, let's talk who 'changed' when you drop received pronunciation.
- weeksie 16y ago
  While 'going against the grain' might not be the correct way to phrase it, you have to reali[sz]e that the entire rest of the English speaking world spells things like that. England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, etc. . . As far as the divergence in spelling is concerned that's almost entirely due to Noah Webster who purposefully spelled things in a more Germanic way because he found the English spellings with the French influences to be distasteful.(1) [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noah_Webster#Blue_Backed_Speller http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noah_Webster#Blue_Backed_Spelle...
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  - _delirium 16y ago
    It doesn't go against most of your point, but the reali[sz]e example in particular isn't Webster's fault or an example of U.S. divergence--- it used to be spelled -ize in the UK too, and didn't really shift completely until the past few decades. It's still the form preferred by the Oxford English Dictionary: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_spelling http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_spelling On the others, there's a bit more of a continuum than everyone using the British spellings, though I'll agree the Commonwealth probably tilts towards more similarity with the UK than with the US. But Canadian spelling, especially, aligns with U.S. usage in a lot of respects: it generally uses -ize rather than -ise endings ("realize", not "realise"), and sides with the Americans on a lot of specific one-off differences ("tire", not "tyre"), though it sides with the U.K. spellings on -our vs. -or ("colour", not "color").

rgrieselhuber 16y ago

I ran into stuff like this all the time when I lived in Japan. Governments and businesses have a long time to go before they catch up with the realities of globalization.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

cperciva 16y ago

No credit Not as much of a problem as you think it is. Canadian companies can pull US credit reports -- like your bank did -- and do so on a regular basis. Not so regular that every car salesman will know how to do it; but any large company will have figured out how to handle this, even if not everybody at the company knows that it's possible.

didtrade 16y ago

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btilly 16y ago

The one thing that I didn't hear which I expected to was confusion about whether forms should be month/day/year or day/month/year. Being a Canadian living in the USA, I never remember which is which in which place, and just want to use the ISO standard YYYY-MM-DD instead.

kasterma 16y ago
Monday: Mon(th)da(y)y(ear) Doesn't get much worse for a mnemonic, but works for me.
- GFischer 16y ago
  That doesn't help the original post: he doesn't remember which is for the US and which is for Canada.
  - xiaoma 16y ago
    How about this? Monday is the 'merican mnemonic.

dublinclontarf 16y ago

On a similar note, I made a payment to my creditcard back home(from China) using SWIFT method of international payments(it's an interbank payment system). On the form there is a section to leave a mesasge or comment for the reciever. My credit cards co told me to put only my CC No. with no spaces or nothing else. Told my wife all this (wrote it down) and she went to make the payment (she's Chinese, it's just easier that she does this kind of thing, from a paperwork efficiency point of view. So of coarse she also puts my name after the card number. The next week I call the company, they can't find the payment, dissapeared into their system. POOF, gone. Will be spending the next few weeks making international calls to chase that one up. They're system is sooooo brittle.

dotBen 16y ago

Ok, how's this for an edge case... I'm a Canadian citizen who was born and lived in UK all his life who lives and works (legally) in the US for 4 years on a non-resident TN visa, I'm not allowed to be considered even a temporary resident in the US despite the fact I've lived here for 4 years, oh but I am considered resident for tax purposes (ie I pay tax here and do a US tax return - but no other residency benefits). When I arrive back in the country I have to say on my landing card that I'm temporally visiting the US and that I'm a resident of the United Kingdom. However, I don't pass the "residency test" of the UK as I've not lived there for 4 years. Technically I'm not resident of any country, which is kinda unsettling. And I'm 'temporally visiting the US' in that I drive out of the airport in the car that I own here and drive home to my apartment where I live with all my furniture and all my stuff in it. US Immigration finds it difficult to accept that I am a Canadian citizen (and have Canadian passport) yet I've never lived in Canada nor do I have a Canadian SSN nor do I have an address in Canada nor have I filed a tax return there (my father is Canadian but I was born in UK). I can't get any loans in the US as I don't have residency (although I don't really want a loan) and I can't buy property in the US, although I do have a US credit rating (I have a US SSN) and I managed to get a US credit card by already having an Amex when I lived abroad, and they carried the relationship over to US card (and started to add up my credit score against it). I believe I traverse a lot of terms and conditions for things like insurance because I'm not a resident and end up being considered in the same category as an illegal immigrant - where the companies want to take their money and turn a blind eye to lack of documentation. Except that I am in the US legally and do have documentation, I'm just not a resident. The visa I am on has no route to Green Card and so I will be in this limbo status indefinitely.

cperciva 16y ago
US Immigration finds it difficult to accept that I am a Canadian citizen (and have Canadian passport) yet I've never lived in Canada nor do I have a Canadian SSN nor do I have an address in Canada nor have I filed a tax return there (my father is Canadian but I was born in UK). There's an easy fix for that. Get a Social Insurance Number and file a tax return. As a non-resident with no Canadian-source income, your tax return should take less than 5 minutes to fill out, and you won't owe any taxes.

dalore 16y ago

Some of the comments are just wrong: > You have to live at least 6 months in the UK to open a bank account or apply for a credit card. I moved to the UK and this was not the case. It was difficult to open a bank account but not because you need to live here 6 months but because the banks require all sorts of identification which you normally don't have as a recent immigrant (stuff like proof of address).

sounddust 16y ago

As an American living in France, I can sympathize. Dealing with the bureaucracy here for any reason is a nightmare. One piece of advice for those in this situation: get the best American Express card that you can qualify for. It doesn't solve all your problems, but there are many cases where it magically just works. One example is ordering things online: AmEx is much more flexible about the shipping/billing address not matching up, and as a result I can often use it with a shipping and billing address from France with no problems. In addition, their customer service is fantastic, and they can often give you good advice or help you out when you get stuck in these situations.

quant18 16y ago
My favourite Amex customer service story is closely related to this expat edge-case theme. I was flying back to Hong Kong from a business trip in Japan. I'm a citizen of a third country, but live in HK. The Japan Airlines desk agent, and her manager, refused to issue me a boarding pass, because I didn't have a "re-entry permit" for Hong Kong. Japan and many other major countries have this concept for non-citizens, so I'm guessing whoever wrote the Japan Airlines "avoid Fooland Immigration Department fining us to pay for deporting our Barlandese passenger, for all values of Foo and Bar" checklist explained it badly and made it sound like a universal requirement or something. But in Hong Kong, there's no such thing as a re-entry permit --- they give you one visa, stamp it "Journey completed" when you arrive, and then let you come and go as you please.* This was in the days before WiFi in airports, so I couldn't just surf to gov.hk and show her the page that says "no re-entry visa required". And it was a Friday night so I couldn't phone the consulate either. At my wit's end, I called Amex --- my employer had paid for the ticket with an Amex card. Their customer service guy commiserated with me for a bit, and said he'd make a phone call. After a bit of a wait, a Cathay Pacific (major Hong Kong airline) manager showed up with a copy of the Hong Kong immigration regulations. Brilliant and creative solution --- and it forcefully demonstrated to me the value of filling customer-facing positions with creative and talented people rather than checklist-wielding drones who you don't screen as carefully as your "core function" staff. * Years later, the HK gov't changed the wording; now it's a tiny bit clearer that you don't need a re-entry permit: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:n5y5QqSqxSIJ:gia.info.gov.hk/general/200609/07/P200609070201_0201_18951.doc&cd=1&hl=zh-TW&ct=clnk&gl=hk http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:n5y5QqS...

jimbokun 16y ago

"The friendly folk at H&R Block had no idea how to handle my situation." I was shocked when I went to H&R block, and all they did was type data into the software on the screen in front of them. I realized I could do that myself, and have used TurboTax since, which has worked well for me needs. (I'm sure if I had more complex need, a real tax accountant would be important, but I don't think there is any case where H&R Block is the right choice.)

barrydahlberg 16y ago

I once had to visit a doctor in Japan. Everything went fine until they went to print me a prescription and tried to enter my name. After explaining that no, I can't provide my name in kanji they went ahead with it in English. My name broke the layout of the form on their screen and when the prescription was printed only the first half was shown because the rest ran off the side of the paper. I guess they don't get many foreigners showing up at the local family doctors clinic.