Ask and You Shall Receive

So my Irish license finally arrived today.

I'm not sure if it was my request over the phone for this to be escalated, or the Strongly Worded Email that I wrote several hours that call. I asked an Aussie/NZ forum what their experience had been with exchanging their license and most people recounted the same saga - waiting 3-4 months and then being restricted to driving automatics.

I mustered all of my academic essay writing skills, scoured the Irish and NZ driver license sites for information and outlined that I was supposed to be receiving a license of equivalent value, and that my NZ license allows me to drive both a manual and an automatic, and that I'd already been waiting longer than the time frame, and if they continued to stall on this, I may lose my job. (Nothing quite like a bit of hyperbole to get one over the line.) There were links, there were pdfs attached, there were screenshots; it was glorious.

I am delighted to announce that I can drive both automatics and manuals with my license.

Why do I have to make a song and dance to just get the systems to work here though? It would not be so bad if this was a once off, but for nearly everything that we've tried to get processed there is so much faffing and waiting that has to happen. For all the bitching about 'Karens' on the internet, there's a positive feedback loop to create more of them - Strongly Worded Emails or Conversations With The Manager seem to be the only way to get things done. At least in Laos, you just had to give them a bit of a 'donation to help their family' to speed things along.

My examples so far include:

Getting my Irish Residency Permit

Being married to an Irishman significantly helps the immigration process here - I will credit Ireland that, getting into and staying in this country was very easy. However, we had to wait nearly 3 weeks to even make an appointment that was 7 weeks in the future (We arrived 16 Feb, my appointment was 16 April), due to the ridiculous system they have for appointments, that weeds out those that have anything at all to do at 10:07am on any given morning, when a handful of appointments are issued.

The appointment itself was quite straight forward, but involved waiting an hour longer than the allotted time for it to begin. I was called to a counter where I needed to show my marriage certificate, passport and proof of address, then was told to resume waiting for the fingerprints.

When the fingerprinting happened, they took my passport to put a stamp in it. I did the fingerprinting, and waited for my passport.

I got called up to do the fingerprinting again as it hadn't worked the first time, and went back to wait for my passport.

I got called up a third time to do my fingerprinting, by which time I was getting rather perturbed. After some rather acerbic words from me, they quickly did my fingerprints on another machine and gave me back my passport.

2.5 hours later, I finally got to escape, thinking that a stamp was all I needed in my passport to freely come in and out of Ireland, as no one said anything to the contrary and (to my knowledge) that's all you need in NZ - a returning residents permit visa in your passport.

We went to London in May and upon reentry I was asked for my GNIB card.
"But I don't have one, they're called an Irish Residency Permit now"
"Where is your GNIB card?"
"I don't have one, but there's a stamp in my passport."
I reach across the counter, try and turn the page on my passport to show her, as she's looking at my initial entry stamp, not the IRP stamp
*stern words for reaching over counter and trying to grab passport*
She actually looks up my file.
"Oh, that's fine. Off you go."

So then I wrote a strongly worded email to the INIS department, and miraculously, 3 days later a card that I didn't know I was waiting for turned up.

Recognition of my Teaching Qualifications

After 2 months, I decided that working part time on minimum wage (€10/hr) at a hotel was not gonna cut it in order to continue living here, so applied for some not-much-more-than-minimum-wage jobs in Early Childhood Education. 

Before my interview, someone else from the company had said that I would need to get my qualifications recognised by the DCYA (Department of Child and Youth Affairs), and that this would take awhile. I had submitted this application on 25 April. They received it 29 April, saying it would take 'several weeks'. When I called mid-May just before my start date, I was told there would be a 12 week wait, and there was nothing I could do to hurry it up. 

During my interview, I was asked when I could start. I said I only had to give one week's notice. I mentioned the 12 week time frame for the qualifications. This was largely ignored in the interview, and when they offered me the job. I accepted started mid-May. 

I was dismissed from my ECE job on 10 June, citing lack of paperwork from DCYA. 

I called DCYA to see what the story was, as my manager had called several times and had not had favourable responses. They continued with the 12 weeks wait response. 

I wrote a Strongly Worded Email saying that their delays were creating financial hardship for me, and within 24 hours had received the confirmation that not only could I work in a ECE centre, I could run one if I wanted to. 

Next, there was a very Strongly Worded Email to the dickwads who decided it was a great idea to get me to quit my job -which I could've stayed at - to start straight away for them, only to then dismiss me for not having the paperwork finalised, and then when the paperwork was finalised, not actually give a crap about said paperwork. #eceinIrelandsucks  #cocooononlycaresabouttheirbottomline #dodgedabullet #nannyingrules

Thorntons Recycling Company Refund

When we first moved to Lucan, I spent a long time doing life admin and setting everything up. One of these things was getting bins for our apartment. 

After much faffing, and trying to explain where our flat was, and giving them our address again and again and again, and explaining that no we didn't have an Eircode, but somehow you got the same bins to the apartment the next floor up from us, and we're giving you the same address, the bins were finally delivered. 

After 2 months of trying to get the internet installed in our apartment, and finding that the only solution was to run a new line and we needed a neighbour's permission to do that, and that we weren't going to get that permission, we moved out, so no amount of Strongly Worded Emails or Phone calls solved that one. 

Having prepaid our bins for a whole year I was quite keen to get a refund, given we'd only used them for 2 months. 

We moved out of Lucan on 25 May, bins were collected early June, I asked for a refund, they said yes, but we must subtract some fees. Ok, fair enough, cool, whatever, gimme my money. So we waited all of June, all of July, at the end of July, I went in there and waited in their offices for an hour to speak to someone about this, saying that I would be leaving with the cheque in my hand.

She was quite nice about it actually, but said that the cheque had to be physically signed by a CEO and he may or may not be in, no one knows his schedule, but he definitely wasn't in today. It had been approved, the cheque has been ripped off (she showed me the stub), and is awaiting a signature.

So not exactly a win for a Strongly Worded Face-to-Face. It was a matter of principle, rather than about the euros at that point though. 

The 15th of August the cheque finally arrived - a longer amount of time than we'd had the bins in the first place. 

(Why it had to be a cheque, I do not know.)

Various Interactions with our First Landlord

Getting internet was the last in a long line of things that had to happen with our first apartment. It was in a recently renovated office building and so there were things like getting the hot water in the shower to work, getting the underfloor heating working, reminding the landlord of his legal obligation to provide a microwave, a dryer or a washing line, and various other basics like a letterbox, securing the oven to the wall or having a key that actually unlocked the door instead of rotating loosely in the lock.

Trying to get somewhere to live that didn't have tiles missing or wires hanging out of the ceiling, or that you could get internet connected to was much harder than I feel it should've been.

The Car Hire Saga of September 2019

It is (ostensibly) really cheap to hire cars here. You can pick one up for like €30 for a weekend. We found one of these 'bargains' prior to our Epic Road Trip with Brendon and Raukawa (which definitely deserves its own blog post). I had given up my license, so I could not be the person who was hiring the car. Jared could. But Jared didn't bring his passport - why would you need one when hiring a car, all you need is a license right? We then spent an hour trying to find anything that showed Jared as resident in Ireland, as proof of address for ID purposes. Turns out ALL the bills are in my name or have our original address. 

Thankfully, there was another car rental place next to this one, and so we went next door, and long story short got a car through another company. Moral of the story: take passport and proof of address with you EVERYWHERE here. 

Strongly Worded Email was required to convince online booking place that the initial car rental never actually went ahead - the company, the cheeky fuckers, had said it did! Luckily I had photographic proof of our second rental with not-them. 

Trinity College and the Book of Kells

When Brendon and Raukawa came to visit in September, we went to see the 400 year old Trinity College Library and the 1200 year old Book of Kells that is housed there. 

There was a security issue the day we went, so we were unable to see the Book of Kells itself. Now I will credit Trinity College with offering a refund in this particular case, but there was a need to email, less strongly worded that the aforementioned examples, in order to avail oneself of the refund. 

I will concede that it is certainly not Ireland alone that has the problem of only doing something when a Strongly Worded Email comes along - I did used to work at Studylink, and I know the inner workings of bureaucracy can sometimes, well, not work. 

The power of the Strongly Worded Email has helped in situations of having my ticket given away to the director because I was 5 minutes late to a show in Palmerston North, and also get me out of a tricky financial situation with access to my Kiwisaver. 

The issue here is that we've racked up as many citations of the Strongly Worded Email needing to be used in 9 months of living here, as I have had in probably the last 9 years in New Zealand - despite the palaver of renovating our house last year. 

I'm reasonably doubtful that my application to the Irish Teacher's Council will be smooth sailing, or be approved in the 3 months that they have outlined, but I am an optimist, so there's a 3% likelihood that by the end of December, I might be able to pick up some relief teaching work - They were super-fast at taking the €300 out of my bank account, so at least there's a smidgen of hope for speed. 

So, to conclude, the age-old adage of 'ask and you shall receive' seems to be the impetus for action in Ireland, and I'm finding that I have less and less patience for flagrant incompetence and glacial-speed bureaucracy as I age. 

Maybe this is how the 'karens' of the internet were created. There was a compounding of incompetence, and they've just decided to skip a few steps and jump straight to speaking to the managers, as soon as something takes 5 seconds longer than it should. 

I used to cringe at the memes that talk about the idea of Karen as some interfering middle aged white woman who, as soon as her skinny caramel latte has 0.05 cm too much foam on top, would be wanting to talk to the manager.

Now I think I am becoming one of those women. 

Obviously my complaint would be 'your roller coaster was lame, please work on a bigger/better/faster/stronger one'.

Upon pondering this for a few months, I have also discovered that I do not really care. 

I, unlike some other karens, do not waste my complaints on things like crappy coffee (otherwise I'd have nothing else to do here). You can make as many denigrating memes about strong women as you like, but it would seem the only way to get things done is to jump up and down and make a song and dance about it. And let's not even pretend like this is a gender issue - there's plenty of grumpy old men out there who are equally as generally miffed. There is literally a movie called Grumpy Old Men.

Ok not exactly talking to the manager, but roll with it.

If the Thing happened in the outlined time frame and to the expected standard, then there would be no need to go all Hulk on them, verbally beating them with my righteous indignation,  calmly and concisely explaining that I am right and they are wrong.

However, passively sitting back and waiting for things to happen, or get better, or change, or for 'God to take the lead', has not worked in my experience, so in order to maintain my title of Action Lauren (TM), then it would seem, there's a new Karen in town, so....

Happy Halloween!

 Disclaimer: No Karens were harmed in the making of this blog post. The same cannot be said for pumpkins.