Business Traveller

One of the guys who works for me took a few days off to go to a School reunion in Sweden. He came back to the office today, and told me all about it. That got me thinking, I’ve never been the least bit interested in a school reunion. I vaguely remember haring once that there was going to be one, but I never bothered finding out when it would be.

Maybe it’s differet in Europe, but I have to say that I’m not in the least bit interested in seeing any of those people ever again. I’ve always thought that people who would be interested are the sorts of people who have made such a mess of thier lives that they long for the days when people looked up to them. Maybe in wrong. Me personally, my life is much better since I left school.

This is a question that I sometimes get asked, so I thought I’d put the informaion together for you as I had to figure it all out myself:-

Step 1:

Go to England and find some way to be alowed to stay there. Here there are a number of options that will be personally applicable to you. Some of the more popular options are:-

• Under the skills shortages provisions, you could be able to get a job under the sponsored work visa program. The skills listed as shortages are always changing, but teachers, Doctors, Nurses and Dentists are always in demand. Almost always in the list are also certain technological skills. Info can be found at http://www.workingintheuk.gov.uk/
• Find somebody with a European passport that you’d quite like to marry (A surprising number of Brits want a South African passport too, so you can sometimes do a bit of a deal…)
• Dig deep in your pockets to get to study at a British University (You’ll have to dig realy deeply. Really Really deeply)

Step 2: 

After step 1, you’ll now have a stamp that allows you to stay in the UK. Keep your nose clean for the next 4 years. Also, make sure that you comply with the rules for how many consecutive days and how many days per year you are allowed to be outside of the country (I travelled allot on business, and came close to over-shooting. Believe me, they check. Every single stamp. 3 times.)

Step 4: 

On the 4rth anniversery of your arrival in the UK, you can apply to the Home Office in Croyden for nice new sticker with a hologram to be put in your passport. This sticker will include the words ‘Indefinite Leave to Remain’ – no, you can’t claim the dole yet with this sticker, you have to wait. Another year. Be especially carefull in this year that you don’t exceed the maximum number of days that you’re allowed to be out of the country. Cocking it up at this point would mean that you have to re-start counting 5 years from the beginning again.

Step 5: 

No less than 1 year after you have been issued the residency visa in your passport, you can start the process of becoming a citizen. To begin with, there is a bunch of paperwork. Don’t even try to figure this out yourself. People who do this for a living cock it up. You have no chance of figuring it out yourself. Spend a couple of hundred pounds, and let them sort out the documentation for you. When they tell you to, phone your local ‘Britishness Test’ centre. Don’t worry about studying yet, just get your appointment as the first priority. It’l be somewhere between 3 weeks and 3 years from the date that you make the call. The centre will be staffed by people who cannot speak English, and will not be able to understan anything that you say in English. This is a good test of Britishness. Keep the stiff upperlip, and persevere until you get your appointment. Ask them to let you know if anybody else cancells, so you can have their appointment. They’ll call you the next day, and your appointment will have moved forward to Tuesday. Remeber to apply to the South African home office before applying to

Step 6: 

Go out and buy the special handbook that all Britishness tests are based on (I haven’t given the name, because they might update it – well, they might. Honest.). Read the book. It’s funny. It tells you all about how happy the Scots are to be part of Britain, and how the Colonies all agree about how much we benefitted from British rule. Now wait for your test. On the day of the test, put all thoughts of common sense out of your head. It’s multiple choice, and the politically correct answer is always the right one. Just pay the person who can’t speak English the £30 fee, sit down at the PC, wait for them to figure out how to start the test. Start the test. Wait for them to bring the network back up. Start the test. Work through it quickly as possible (remember to avoid common sense at all costs), and hopefully finish before the network goes down again (It took me 4 minutes). Tell the person who can’t speak English that you finished. Shrug at her incredulous stares. Wait for the network to come up again, and her to figure out how to log in again. Wait for her to figure out how to get your results. Wait for her to figure out how to print the certificate that says you passed. Now wait for the technician to come and fix the printer. Teake you printed certificate hom with you, and send it to the immegration lawyers you hired.

Step 7: 

The lawyers will have sent in your final application, documents, certificate, etc. to the home office. Keep copies of everything, the lawyers, the home office, and the carrer pigeon will all have taken turns at losing something. Ideally get certified copies made. Wait.

 Step 8:

Wait some more

Step 9: 

Shout at the lawyers because they promised you that they would get it for you faster than you could get it yourself. The lawyers will phone their old friend at the Home Office, who will discover what ti is that was lost, and ask you to re-send some bit of key information, like the data for every bowell movement you had in the last 6 years, the pproximate weight, and a quality assessment read off a chart. They will then ask for all your old passports, so that they can make double sure you didn’t spend an extra half-an hour outside of the UK. Stand firm, they’re bluffing. Forenzic scientists couldn’t read some of those stamps.

Step 10: 

You will eventually recieve an invitation to request an invitation to attend your citizenship ceremony. Use the invitation to request your invitation. A few days later, the invitation you requested will arrive. Attend the ceremony, and smile when the minor royal / mayor tells you through grated teeth about how happy he is to invite you foreigners to his pristine country, and how much you’ll enrich England. Read you certificate, and notice that they spelled your name wrong. Send in a written application to have the name changed, with the reasons, and all the documentation you’ve ever had in your name, to prove that it really is your name.

Step 11: 

Around 4 months after you sent you certificate back to ahve the name fixed, you will get the fixed certificate back. Do’t bother to phone before then. They won’t talk to you. Don’t expect an achnologement that they got your application for the change either. They don’t do that. Take your fixed certificate, fill in the forms for your passport (don’t smile in the photos). Get somebody that will claim to have known you for the last 4 years, and who has a degree, to sign that the photo is you. Send off to the passport office (use the Post Office application checking service. It’ll save you months). Wait 3 days, and voila. You have a British passport. The world is now your oyster (use the South African passport to go to South africa though. They get sticky abou that)

Some hippy types in America have come up with a solution to all the world’s problems. Apparently a good shag, and thinking peacefull thoughts in the afterglow will transform all the negative, aggressive energy in the world to something more groovy…

I’m not saying that it will definitely work, but I’m wiling to try (almost) anything for world peace. So, I think that we should try to amplify the good vibes on 22 December. I think I’ll set-up a ‘Love thy neighbor – in groups’-athon. After a good shag, we can all savour the communal afterglow, and think happy thoughts? Anybody who wants in, let me know here! 

I didn’t notice it at the time, but yesterday a dramatic change came over me. I didn’t even realise it until I got home, and even then the realisation was slow to dawn. I looked in the mirror, but I didn’t look any different. My 2 dogs recognised me instantly, and licked me like normal, so they must not have noticed the change.

You see, sometime yesterday morning (probably around 10am), I instantly stopped being somebody that most countries want to keep out. All that terrible African-ness that made me so undesirable to Germany, all the terrible things that I could do in Italy, all of that was suddenly washed away as if it had never existed.

Yes, you guessed it. Yesterday, when Pat visited my house, he brought with him a little Bergundy book with my picture in it. 6 years of jumping through hoops had finally paid off…

Never again will I have to queue outside the German consulate at 4am. Never again will I have to apologise to our Italian CTO for the fact that I broke the rules of my Shengin Visa by using the visa that he had endorsed to go to Germany before going to Italy, thereby bringing the wrath of the Italian shengin office down on his head. Never again to stand at a British immigration desk, and be faced with raft of questions about what I – a foreigner – intend to do in their country.

There is one thing that I will miss though. I’l really miss walking up to that immigration desk at Heathrow, and seeing the glee creep into the immigration officer’s face as I tell him that I intend to work while in the UK. I love watching their excitement build as they realise that they are going to get to deport somebody today. And then I really really love seeing that look crash as they get to the page with my work visa / residency stamp on it, and they are forced to stamp me through anyway…

The other day, I found out an interesting fact. In 1906, when the Springoks first toured the UK, they weren’t called the Springboks – they were just called South Africa. A British newspaper (the Daily Mail) was the first to give them the name ‘Springboks’, and it’s stuck ever since.

Yesterday, I was fortunate enough to have a ticket to go and watch the Springboks play. The seat was aweful. My legs were below the level of the field. and as you can see from the photo, I was behind the posts, so I could’t make out too much of what was happening on the field. And do you know what? I’m glad. Not because I couldn’t see what happened to make us lose (as you may expect). No, I am glad because, removed from the clinical camera angles and instant replays, what I saw was 30 guys on a rugby field playing their hearts out.

Like many South Africans that were so filled with pride at our ‘95 world cup visctory, I have become disilusioned about the politics that has crept into South African rugby. So much so that I forgot what rugby is really about. Yesterday, in a stadium of 38,000 fans who cheered and held their breaths at every development, I was a South African fan, adding my voice to those of my countrymen, trying to give my team that extra little buit that they needed to win.

It was great, and do you know what – if all of us forget about the bulshit, and just give our team our unreserved support, I’m sure that they can be great again!

I just read this article about a 40cm high Tsunami that hit Japan.

It got me to thinking about that time I went windsurfing on Hartebeespoort Dam, and how there were all these waves that I thought were caused by wakes of the motorboats, but they were about 40cm high, some of them. I thought I was perfectly safe, but some of them may well have been killer tsunamis, and I just didn’t recognise the danger. If I’d known, I would definitely have gone to higher ground, so I guess I was just lucky that day…

Sarcasm aside though, surely there has to be some sort of minimum size definition for a Tsunami? Surely 40cm doesn’t quite cut it? Otherwise the entire South African coast is under constant bombardment…

I’m completely and thoroughly bored with Ninety Nine Nights. Although the graphics are pretty, the game-play is boring and repetitive. Also, that bitch’s voice just grates on me.

Surprisingly, I’ really starting to enjoy Ghost Recon. Once you take the time out to learn the controls, the game-play is challenging, and you actually have to think about how to achieve the objectives.

I also just read that Halo 3 will be available early next year – woohooo!

As many people already know, I work a large multi-national company. Actually, there has recently been a little debate as to whether we are still the biggest company of our sort in the world, or whether we have been supplanted by an American Company that grew it’s customer base through acquisitions earlier this year.

In this company I’m a member of the senior management team, with a fancy ‘Head of…’ title, and I get to define the company’s strategy in terms of charging for things, and how to do it, which can be interesting at times, and boring as all hell at others…

In the context of the company, though, there has been a recent emphasis on the need to innovate to do 2 things:-

1.) Keep our customer base loyal, as they can get everything that they want from us.

2.) Expand our customer base through offering exciting new things to our customers that they can’t get anywhere else.

The company is so serious about this that they have appointed a ‘Innovation Officer’ to the main board, and given him a Venture Capital group in California to work with (complete with $300 Million in venture capital to spend). When it became clear that they weren’t doing a great job of doing anything innovative, he got canned (although the VC group is still in place), and the new CTO came and gave us all a speech about how important it is for all of us to innovate.

I decided to find out a bit about what’s in it for an employee, and bizarrely the only thing that the board is offering is a vague suggestion that employees who come up with great ideas could possibly be involved in bringing the idea into production. While this prospect is vaguely attractive in that it could result in the employee having a more interesting day job, it hardly seems to be worth it for an employee with a truly great idea.

For somebody with a great idea, you would have 2 options:-

1.) Try to get venture capital funding for the business idea, and turn it into a stand-alone business. The risk here is that you’d have to leave the company first (to avoid giving the intellectual rights to our company, as per the contract) and the risk that the business could fail. The reward is potentially huge wealth, and the reward of having something truly interesting to do for a day job.

2.) Present the idea to the company, maybe get a more interesting job out of it, if you’re lucky. Risk = 0. Reward = fluffy near 0.

My point is this. Employees with so-so ideas will present their ideas to the company, and some of them may get implemented. From the company perspective, it means potentially offering some cute services to their customers, but nothing earth-shattering that would make a real difference to the company per-say.

Employees that do have fantastic ideas will probably leave, get the Venture Capital they need, build something awesome that may very well compete with the company that they have just left. In order to fix this, the company will have to either buy them, or face the prospect of one of their competitors buying them, or have to build something that can compete in a ‘me too’ world.

Point is, it’s not exactly the way a company that truly wants to innovate does things. That’s what they just don’t seem to understand…