A Geek in London

This is a follow-up to my previous post where I went to the A&E (ER) on Friday because I had the tip of a cotton bud stuck way down deep in my ear.

I waited for about 30-45 minutes before being called back by the doctor.  He immediately admonished me, and told me that I should never stick anything in my ear. (I got the feeling he was even against elbows).

He told me that he was going to try once to get the cotton bud out, and if he couldn’t, that he was going to have to send me off to the Ears, Nose, and Throat people.

He called in two nurses from the hallway, and instructed them on how to pull the corners of my ears in all the various cardinal directions.  I imagined my outer ear was being pulled flat like a bed sheet just before you fold it.

The doctor tried once and couldn’t get at it.  He returned to his cabinet and got a different pair of tweezers and tried again, and again he failed.  He tried a few more times, before returning to the cabinet and returning with the scariest pair of tweezers I’ve ever seen.  These things looked like two long needles connected by a thin pin on which they could pivot.  They certainly would be used as a weapon if they were somehow found lying around in a prison.  The doctor tried a few times with those, and gave up.

He told me that he wasn’t going to be able to get it and he would indeed need to send me off to ENT.  He went across the hall and called them, and returned to tell me that they weren’t going to be able to get me in until Monday, and I’d have to go the entire weekend with the cotton bud stuck deep down in my ear.

At this point a young cocky acting hotshot doctor was walking down the hall and popped his head in to see what was going on.  He told my doc that he’d be able to get the cotton bud out on the first try.   Hotshot Doc took up the super scary tweezers of death, and with the help of the nurses tugging on the corners of my ear, he went in for the kill.  This doc was not as cautious as the previous doctor, bumping the sides of my ears a few times.  However, true to his word, within a few seconds I could hear the cotton bud being pulled towards the light and out of my ear.

Hotshot Doc took a look in my ear and said my eardrum was a bit inflammed, but not damaged.  He gave me the same lecture about sticking things in my ear, before sending me on my way.

I now kicking the habit, and need to find a 12-step program for recovering Q-Tip addicts.

So there is that saying, ‘the smallest thing you should stick in your ear is your elbow’. I should try very hard to start living by that.

I’ve always had very itchy/waxy ears, and have used Q-Tips / cotton buds to clean them out. I always imagine the joy/sensation that I get from using a Q-Tip to be very similar to the feeling Hank must getwhen I scratch those prime spots behind his ear or under his collar that cause him to uncontrollably kick his leg in rythym to the speed of my scratching.

I’ve also ignored warnings on the package of Q-Tips that say, ‘do not stick in ear.’. Isn’t that the overwhelming use for Q-Tips?  Thats like a BitTorrent client saying, ‘do not use this product to download illegal content’.

Well last night before bed I was doing my ear cleaning routine, and when I pulled to cotton bud out of my ear, there was no cotton on the end of it.  I tried with tweezer to fish it out, however it wasn’t shallow enough for me to get to it comfortably, and I wasn’t going to go any further in.

This morning I had Len take a look, and he said it was in there pretty deep, he could just barely see it.

So now, I’m experiencing my first visit to the A&E (ER) in the UK.

I think the worst part so far has been telling the intake nurse why I’m here, while a dozen people in the waiting room could hear me, and most of them certainly there for much more serious or painful reasons.

• My initial 6 month visa for the UK was set to expire on December 28th and as of early December nothing had been sorted out to allow me to return.
• My company wanted to keep me however their application to the Home Office to be eligible to sponsor a foreign national was delayed do to the high number of applications.
• I looked further into my ability to get a ‘highly skilled’ visa on my own, and fell 5 points short of the 75 points needed to qualify
• A week before I leave I receive a Christmas bonus from my company, and as a result am awarded 10 additional points towards a ‘highly skilled’ visa application
• December 28th - I return to America, Ben picks me up at the new airport, Hank is confused to see me.
• Most of January - Stress over the visa application and the incredibly precise documents standards that the UKBA require.  Learn that 60% of applications are rejected for not providing documents for education, earnings, bank statements, that adhere to those standards.
• While in America, visit the family a few times, hang out with friends, revive Sunday night TV night for one last season, sleep in own bed, amused by Hank’s need to remain close.
• Early February finally have all of my documents in order.  Send off visa application to a courier in Chicago on a Monday, courier recieves it on Tuesday, courier delivers it to consulate on Wednesday, courier e-mails me on Friday to tell me that the Visa was approved and I should have it on Monday morning via FedEx
• Monday, I marvel at the new page in my passport and my Highly Skilled visa good for 3 years.
• Through February I do as much as I can to deal with my stuff in the house, moving some of it to my sisters.  Most of the rest of the stuff in the house will need to remain there until my current friends/tenants move out and I turn it over to a rental agency.
• March 3rd fly back to UK
• March 4th arrive in the UK, and Nick comes to airport to meet me and help me with my luggage
• March 5th get called into work for a 3 hour meeting with business partners. jetlag in full effect
• Stay with Nick for the first 10 days while I search for a new flat to live in.
• After looking at about 15 different places I decide on a place near Tulse Hill.  A great house, great room, however not sold on the area and transportation options at this point.
• After 2 weeks of being back I am finally starting to relax and get back into a non-stressed groove.

One of the things that I’ve been dreading for a while now is the approach of the incredibly short days here in England.   London is much further north than any place I’ve ever lived, it is on the same latitude as northern Canada, just a touch higher than Calgary, and because of this the winter days are mucher shorter and the summer days are much longer.

In Bloomington the earliest the sun will set this winter is 5:20pm.  On the solstice, the shortest day of the year, Bloomington will have 9hrs 20mins of sunlight.

Today, in London, the sun will set at 3:59pm.   It will set as early as 3:51pm in a few weeks.  Our shortest day here will be 7hrs 49mins.

I do realize that this is the trade off for the incredibly lovely days in the middle of the summer where the sky is still light until after 10pm, and the days reach close to 17 hours of daylight.  However, it is a bit of a downer to look out the window of my office an hour and a half before I leave and see that it is dark as night.

p.s.

The update on the work permit is that there is no update.

I’m a money geek, I know this.  I spend as much time on Bloomberg.com as I do on TechCrunch or Engadget.  I log into my Yodlee and Mint accounts frequently and see the grand overview of my entire financial life.  I download two podcasts daily that are financial news related (Marketplace and NPR Planet Money) and a separate one that is devoted to consumer finance (The Clark Howard Show).  With all of this in mind, it should really not be a surprise to anyone that knows me that I would go to an art house cinema to see a documentary about the U.S. National Debt.

The movie, “I.O.U.S.A.”, was directed by Patrick Creadon (The same director as the documentary “Wordplay”, another excellent film) and funded by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation (former Secretary of Commerce).  The movie simultaneously follows members of The Concord Coalition across the country on their ‘Fiscal Wake Up’ tour, intersperses on screen interviews with Warren Buffet, former Fed Chairmans Alan Greenspan and Paul Volcker, former Treasure Secretary Paul O’Neill and others, while breaking down the complex issues relating to the national debt into manageable (to comprehend, not deal with) pieces.

There is a cursory recounting of the national debt over time, from 1787 through early 2008, displayed as a percentage of GDP.  There has only been one time (in approximately 1830, where our debt was at $0).  After understanding how we arrived at ‘modern day’, we are given a more thorough examination of the debt and federal budget since the early 1990s.

During the last 40 years, there have only been five years that the Government has spent less money that it collected in taxes (a budget surplus).  Four of those years occurred between 1998-2001.  Since 2001 the government has run an ever increasing budget deficit each year (excluding any consideration of recent bailouts) and we are now looking at over twice the debt had at the beginning of the decade.

From the US Treasury website, the National Debt on Friday was:  $10,617,806,584,635.27  

The total GDP for the US in 2007 was $13.8 trillion.

Making the National Debt approximately 75% of GDP.

So why is this scary and un-nerving and all of the rest.  Well, we’re still running budget deficits, meaning that this number is continuing to grow and not shrink, this debt is accumulating interest, which is compounding the problem even further, and lastly there is the Social Security issue.

We all know that social security takes money from current workers to give to current retirees.   As an isolated system, this is fine for the time being.  However you should also know that in the not so distant future there will be fewer dollars collected from workers than will need to be paid to recipients.  Looking at this as an isolated situation this obviously means that when that future arrives, social security benefits will be a further strain on the Federal Budget.  The most frightening part of the problem is that it’s not isolated.

Social Security as an isolated system has been running huge surpluses for a long time.  So what has the government been doing with those surpluses?  They’ve been using them in other parts of the budget.  Meaning, that when we get to the point where social security is a negative sum game, the excesses that have been used to ineffectually prop up the system until then will go away creating a magnified effect.

For the 2008 budget, this surplus will be about $187 billion.  

There is much more to the problem than what I highlighted here. It’s also related to the trade imbalance of our exporting less than we are importing, it has to do with who owns our debt, it has to do with American Citizens lack of concern about the problem, and on and on.

So should we be concerned? I can’t say “F%@K YES” loudly enough.

In your own household, imagine if your total debt was 75% of your annual income.  [You can assume 'non-mortgage' debt since ideally your mortgage is offset by your equity in your home]  Now imagine that you aren’t paying any of that down each year and the interest is slowly adding to it.  Also, maybe occasionally you add something else to a new credit card.  The debt continues to rise, you continue to sputter, and eventually you realize the snowball has so much momentum that it’s unable to be stopped.

As a country we are not very far away from this event horizon.

GO SEE THIS MOVIE: I.O.U.S.A. 

ADD IT TO YOUR NETFLIX QUEUE: