Over The Counter Culture

Some stats: 4 friends. 7 visas to be obtained. 2 weeks to go before departure. 7 months abroad!

6 visits to the India visa centre. 3 visits to the chinese centre. 1 lost receipt - crucial. 1 lost passport photo - crucial. £350.

Some observations:

- both China and India now outsource their visa applications and collections to a private company. Yes, the irony of India outsourcing something - to the UK! - is staggering (even more so when the Indian IT system crashes). Yes, this just adds an extra layer of crap to deal with, and delays on your application. You submit at the centre, they take their cut (check these: China imposes a £30 visa fee, the contractor then charges a £30 service fee on top of that!), they send it to the embassy, they receive it from the embassy, they give you the visa. Is that service really necessary? should it cost as much as the Visa itself? It’s small comfort that my government charges foreigners even more for their visas!

- the Indian visa centre smells of fart and is terribly overcrowded. Fill in your forms and pay online, from the comfort of your own home, and book an appointment. Then photoshop the appointment letter to show whatever date and time suits *you* - wave it in the bouncer’s face when you get there and he’ll print you off a good number. The baaaad numbers put you in the ‘no appointment’ queue - and instead of waiting 30 minutes, you’ll be kept waiting up to 2 hours. So avoid it - Photoshop!

- if you’re like me - submitting Visa applications on behalf of friends from around the country, and like me, you happen to lose their passport photo with no way of getting another in time - fake it. This wasn’t a great job (those watermarks are there for a reason!), but printed out on printer paper, it convinced the Communist Government of China. Before and after:

- processing times are usually 3 days. Avoid the Chinese express services if you can, they’re bloody expensive! Note, the Indian visa service doesn’t offer an express service. Plan ahead!

- extra tips: if you have a non-UK passport, the Indians need to see a proof of UK residence from over 12 months ago. The Chinese don’t, but for UK citizens and aliens alike, they need to see flight bookings to China and hotel bookings for your first few nights in China. I had to edit the email sent by the hotel to add my name and a co-traveller’s, before printing it out and submitting. The Chinese visa centre has 2 computers with free Internet access and free colour printing - invaluable!

- scan everything. I cannot stress how important a tip this is. Scan all the receipts you get for passports, scan the passports, the visas, everything. I lost the receipt for my passport and that of a friend - the Chinese would absolutely not have bent the rules and given his passport back to me without him being there in person, without a great deal of charm and printouts of his and my passport scans.

I’ve finally had to face up to the question of what path to take in life. Nobody said deciding on a path through life was easy, and I never expected it to be - but how you manage the human relationships on which your decision process depends can dramatically affect the outcome. This is a lesson recently branded upon my brain, likely very painfully: as I write, a door seem likely to be closing to me that I would have absolutely loved to take, as a result of cowardly mismanagement of one such relationship.

I’ve been faced with a short term opportunity to work with a fantastic bunch of people in a company with a great mission, with a position doing something reasonably interesting. It wouldn’t pay much, in a city that’s (in)famously expensive to live in, and the outcome is highly uncertain and might leave me in a financially unsustainable city with no job. What I’ve been trying to do is greatly reduce the risk by trying to line up a job for winter ‘09 onwards - in an industry which I think would suit me, career-wise. So it comes down to balancing the short term and the long term.

Having been offered the short term position, the long term position dragged their feet, taking their time to organise interviews, get back to me with decisions (and in fact they still haven’t, despite the matter being supposed to have found some sort of closure a week ago).

Rather than having the maturity and openness to communicate what was going on to the startup I wanted to work for over the summer, I in turn stalled them and they were left in the dark about what was going on. I had absolutely no idea what the consequences would be of admitting to a company offering me a position that I was seeking alternate offers. Partly, the issue was that I was slightly leaning towards the view that if the long term path was unwilling to give me time to work for the startup over the summer, I might, to my extreme chagrin, have to sacrifice the short term experience for the long view option.

Keeping them in the dark until I had all the options laid out before me was not a conscious strategy, but rather, a reflex equivalent to sticking my head in the sand. It was a ’strategy decision’ that was made unconsciously, played out over several weeks, as I waited for new information from the long term factor, stalling the startup at every point, thinking I was getting close to a resolution [which hasn't even arrived yet!]

In retrospect it was a cowardly and naive thing to do, completely blind to the needs and feelings of my summer employers - a startup needs to execute fast, smoothly, and with access to the fullest information potentially available to it (hence the importance of openness in all dealings with them) - and I gave them nothing but uncertainty, delays, and a feeling of being played and manipulated as I sought “alternatives” (when really I was seeking a safety net to enable me to work with them at a [reduced] level of personal risk that I could find to be workable).

Furthermore, they were hiring me for a position which demanded great communication skills with outsiders, in addition to the openness and honesty of emotion that working in a small team demands. I’ve demonstrated neither of those in the very turbulent past few weeks that followed my uprooting from a stable, 4-year stretch at university.

Unsurprisingly, they’re mighty pissed off and I’ve greatly shaken their confidence in me, and the chances that this opportunity is still open seem very remote.

Managing your options and the relationships attached to them is no simple task, especially when they each have their own resolution timelines (remember, I’m still waiting to hear back from the long term opportunity), expectations and outcomes. It’s not a simple set of simultaneous equations you can solve and find the right solution to - you often have to make a decision without all the information and options clear to you. There’s a life lesson in risk and decision right there, for sure. And neither is communicating with the people offering you the options - I’ve never known how to explain jobseeking alternatives to potential employers.

But what I’ve learnt here - potentially very painfully if the short term opportunity closes to me - is that openness and honesty would have been the best policy, daunting and impossible though it may have seemed at the time. People would have been more understanding than I feared, had I been open with them and found the right way to explain what was going on, to dispel - or at least minimise - their fears. Obscurity and stalling is the confused coward’s way out - and I fell for its lure; hopefully, if I’ve learnt my lesson, for the last time.

Currently printing out my note output (I’m experimenting with mindmaps generated with Freemind) from the past few weeks for exams in a fortnight. Started with a relatively simple one to make puzzle-fitting easier, and sort out margins etc. The human cancer ones are gonna be a nightmare. ~20 more of these to go.

…but this is definitely NOT what labs are like (via Behance)

(Also, I graduate 2 weeks from now - and will hopefully never have to pipet anything ever again)