dolorosa_12 | Inject this straight into my veins!

I fell off the face of the (online) earth for over a week for various tedious and frustrating reasons, and I think I will have to leave unresponded the comments that have accumulated here, unfortunately. So apologies if you commented on previous posts or replied to my comments: I'm just feeling really weighed down at the moment.

In better news, however, I had my first vaccine dose! It was Pfizer (the UK was mainly giving everyone AstraZeneca, but then they abruptly withdrew it from use for the under-40s about a week before it was my age group's turn to be eligible, which then slowed everything down considerably), and the whole process went extremely smoothly.

I didn't have a very severe reaction: a sore arm at the injection site, and mild cold symptoms for about a day after the vaccine was administered, and that's it. I'm really really fortunate that the UK has a) hoarded vaccine doses and b) handled the vaccine rollout really well, and I don't take that lightly. (For comparison, my mother in Australia — aged 72 — only had her first dose on Tuesday this week.)

Other than vaccines, I've spent this week dealing with a particularly complicated and infuriating bit of Australian bureaucracy (a word of advice: don't leave the country at a time when all tax returns were done on paper rather than online, allow your only bank account to close in 2014, and just assume the authorities will be able to verify you easily over the phone!). It's not a tax thing — I've not worked in Australia since 2008, and of course always paid taxes correctly before that — but it's a thing that would have caused me to lose access to the small amount of superannuation I had accumulated while I worked there. Several extremely expensive phone conversations with the bureaucrats later and I think it's sorted out, and I'm genuinely stunned at how helpful and efficient the Australian tax authorities at the call centre are! (It also helps that my paranoia in dealing with the UK immigration system has led me to save every single document ever, meaning that although I have long since forgotten the details of my Australian bank account, I have electronic payslips saved in my email inbox from 2006 which have that bank's details on them, and can easily dig them out on request...)

In any case, with all that out of the way, the weekend is looking sunny in both a literal and metaphorical sense.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

So glad to hear from you! Don't worry about comments at all--sometimes you just have to have a reset. I'm so glad to hear that you've gotten the jab!

And even though the bureaucratic experience seems like an exhausting one, it's nice to know that you got so much efficient help! I love civil servants actually.

Thanks! I'm very understanding with other people about comments, but very hard on myself!

I love most civil servants too, but I was concerned because a) I had to deal with this over the phone in the last month of the Australian financial year (so thousands of people are phoning up about their tax returns) and b) it was a very complex situation. I've also had awful experiences with the US IRS (I'm a US citizen and even though I don't earn enough to pay tax there, all US citizens need to file tax returns, even if they live and work overseas and have never lived and worked in the US) — they were quite literally the rudest, most unhelpful, and to be honest downright nasty civil servants I have ever dealt with — and I spent eight years dealing with the UK Home Office! In any case, as I say the Australian tax office was great.

I am really not surprised to hear that about the IRS. I feel like it's so reviled in the States that even the people who end up getting a job there probably have a negative attitude about it. Unfortunate!!!! And omg dealing with immigration stuff in any form sucks, even when the people directly helping you are nice, because immigration law is one of the worst things in the whole entire world. My sympathies!

I imagine working for the IRS is a pretty thankless task, but I was still shocked at how rude they were. Such a contrast with normal US customer service (in restaurants etc), which is so attentive that it almost feels obsequious to people not used to that style!