Friday open thread: Bitter work
Oct. 9th, 2020 10:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolorosa_12Welcome back to another Friday open thread. This week's question is a suggestion from likeadeuce: what is something you have learned in the past (5/10/however many) years?
I assume 'learning' can be interpreted as broadly as possible: formal classes or tutorials, a life or academic skill, a life lesson — certainly I'm happy to see responses that encompass all types of learning.
I've got two answers (although there are many, many more things that I have learnt): a sad one, and a happier one.
The sad answer is that by grim necessity (namely, my desire to remain a resident of the country which had become my home, where I met my husband and most of my friends, and where most of the important moments of my adult life took place), I learnt to navigate a cruel, hostile, incompetent, and indifferent bureaucracy. That's right, I'm talking about the UK Home Office, and the ghastly process that is applying for visas and citizenship.
It's hard to tell, when dealing with these applications, whether the Home Office is cruelly incompetent or incompetently cruel. Either way, the process is designed basically as a deterrent, and navigating it is an utter nightmare. (The worst moment: spending a month arguing with them that they were sending me letters — and thus on the verge of issuing me with a citizenship certificate — in the wrong name. They refused to accept this, even though they had my passport, current visa, birth certificate, and eight years' worth of files on me, all in the correct name. It took an intervention by the immigration compliance officer at my employer to get them to fix this mistake, which led me to wonder — what happens to all the people who fall into these kind of disasters and do not have the support of a wealthy, prestigious university to argue their case?)
I became a citizen in 2016, and instead of feeling happy and elated, all I felt was an exhausted, furious sense of relief. And I know this is common from my other immigrant friends. If you want to create a batch of new citizens whose main feeling towards their new country is a sense of enraged fury, you couldn't have designed a more perfect system. In the years since I've been a citizen, the whole process has in fact become even worse.
All that being said, what the experience did teach me was an infinite patience with bureaucracy, and exemplary skills for compiling extensive batches of paperwork to prove various things. And no administrative task will ever daunt me again! Whenever Matthias and I are faced with unpleasant bureaucratic tasks, we always say, 'well, at least it's not as bad as dealing with the Home Office' as a form of encouragement!
A much happier skill which I've picked up during lockdown: container gardening. Not everything has been a success, but I have become a expert at growing tomatoes in pots, and that's been a constant source of delight throughout the past six months. I just ate the last of this year's batch on Monday, and I'm looking forward to growing even more tomatoes next year. I haven't had much luck with other plants, apart from herbs and radishes, but I'll try to be a bit more ambitious in the future.
What have you learnt?
likeadeuce: what is something you have learned in the past (5/10/however many) years?I assume 'learning' can be interpreted as broadly as possible: formal classes or tutorials, a life or academic skill, a life lesson — certainly I'm happy to see responses that encompass all types of learning.
I've got two answers (although there are many, many more things that I have learnt): a sad one, and a happier one.
The sad answer is that by grim necessity (namely, my desire to remain a resident of the country which had become my home, where I met my husband and most of my friends, and where most of the important moments of my adult life took place), I learnt to navigate a cruel, hostile, incompetent, and indifferent bureaucracy. That's right, I'm talking about the UK Home Office, and the ghastly process that is applying for visas and citizenship.
It's hard to tell, when dealing with these applications, whether the Home Office is cruelly incompetent or incompetently cruel. Either way, the process is designed basically as a deterrent, and navigating it is an utter nightmare. (The worst moment: spending a month arguing with them that they were sending me letters — and thus on the verge of issuing me with a citizenship certificate — in the wrong name. They refused to accept this, even though they had my passport, current visa, birth certificate, and eight years' worth of files on me, all in the correct name. It took an intervention by the immigration compliance officer at my employer to get them to fix this mistake, which led me to wonder — what happens to all the people who fall into these kind of disasters and do not have the support of a wealthy, prestigious university to argue their case?)
I became a citizen in 2016, and instead of feeling happy and elated, all I felt was an exhausted, furious sense of relief. And I know this is common from my other immigrant friends. If you want to create a batch of new citizens whose main feeling towards their new country is a sense of enraged fury, you couldn't have designed a more perfect system. In the years since I've been a citizen, the whole process has in fact become even worse.
All that being said, what the experience did teach me was an infinite patience with bureaucracy, and exemplary skills for compiling extensive batches of paperwork to prove various things. And no administrative task will ever daunt me again! Whenever Matthias and I are faced with unpleasant bureaucratic tasks, we always say, 'well, at least it's not as bad as dealing with the Home Office' as a form of encouragement!
A much happier skill which I've picked up during lockdown: container gardening. Not everything has been a success, but I have become a expert at growing tomatoes in pots, and that's been a constant source of delight throughout the past six months. I just ate the last of this year's batch on Monday, and I'm looking forward to growing even more tomatoes next year. I haven't had much luck with other plants, apart from herbs and radishes, but I'll try to be a bit more ambitious in the future.
What have you learnt?
no subject
Date: 2020-10-10 07:23 pm (UTC)Learning to cook (or rather learning how to manage the whole cooking process so it became much more streamlined) is a great thing to have learnt, and the dishes you've posted about always look delicious!