Burlaki on the Thames

If anyone cares how the call limit debacle ended, feel free to look below the fold to learn how it surprisingly concluded to my [almost] entire satisfaction.
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I have not mentioned the concept of the call limit in the past, and yesterday we unwittingly ran afoul of it.

In a nutshell, when a landline phone service is being established in the UK, the phone company determines the monetary limit that the customer should stay under during any given billing cycle. Exceed the limit - and your outgoing calls are summarily blocked unless you pay down the balance with a credit card (if you are so inclined, you can wait to pay your bill in the normal fashion at the end of the cycle, but you will only be able to receive calls during this time).
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Say, you browse a store, any store, and come across an attractive item that is on sale. You’d be lukewarm to the idea of obtaining said item at its original listed price, but an ability to buy it at a discount closes the deal for you.

Now, suppose, as you reach the checkout and a clerk scans the barcode in, the original non-discounted price comes up on the register. You point out to the cashier that the advertised price is considerably below what they are attempting to charge you. What do you hear in response?

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I have written before (say, here) about the calling plan that we have in the UK. The name of the plan is TalkTalk and it is with the company called Carphone Warehouse. For a basic monthly charge of £20, we do not pay anything at all for landline calls. And not only within the UK, but also within 35 other countries (pretty much all of Europe, plus Canada, Australia, New Zealand and, most importantly, the US). Calls to mobiles and to toll service lines are extra, but that amounts to a minuscule amount, while allowing us practically unlimited phone time with friends and family. (There is a 69-minute limit, after which the charges start accruing, but simply hang up, redial, and you have yourself another hour-plus of free talk).

Except, Russia is not one of the 35 countries covered by the free service and is quite costly to call. Natasha, obviously, regularly calls her family there, and the frequency of her calls has understandably increased of late. At something around 60p a minute, though, lengthy frequent calls would run us huge charges…

The solution? Easy. Buy an American calling card that gives you 400 minutes for $5, and dial through its US-based access number. Since calling the US is free for us, the cost of the call is exactly what it would be by using the calling card from, say, a New Jersey landline. Ingenious!

Of course, these calling cards never deliver on their promise, and with hidden charges and what not, you probably only get 100 minutes or so, but the difference between 5¢ and 60p per minute is quite considerable, wouldn’t you say?

Tying a few of old threads today.
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Continuing with the driving license thread, Natasha finally has scheduled her practical test for sometime in November, and in the meantime, decided to take a lesson or two. The rationale is obviously not to practice driving, but to practice passing the test. At the first lesson, as soon as she pulled out, the instructor remarked that she made five mistakes in the process. Are you kidding me?! The guy is probably looking to scaring her into signing up for additional lessons. Yet, there is little doubt that an examiner during the test will be pedantic in looking for very specific behavior and actions and unreceptive to the notion of prior driving experience, so it makes sense to learn the right formula.
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I have long planned to write an entry on the cost of living comparison between London and New York/New Jersey area. Such an endeavor, being of questionable value from the start, is certainly hard to make compelling. Or exhaustive. At long last, I decided to still do it, but in a limited form…
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One of my free rides has finally caught up with me. To the tune of £830.
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On our trip to the States, we had to take care of renewing two sets of important documents.
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I have ranted on several occasions in the past about British approach to customer service. While the problems that I described before - particularly, incessant handovers from one department to another, with attendant need to go through “security questions” and the description of the issue at hand again and again, - still exist, I am starting to realize that my view of the American approach may have been inexplicably tinted in rosy undertones.
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Contrary to my regular protestations of an utterly routine boredom, things happen to us all the time. As it happens with the rest of humankind, only the biggest things tend to leave an imprint on our memory and, later on, resurface at a point of writing a blog entry.

The last few days gave rise to a few big occurrences, so my task of keeping an up-to-date, yet entertaining, chronicle is so much simpler.
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A funny realization has hit me a few days ago - in a certain sense, somehow, we have been living for free for quite some time.
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That hail on Sunday was a precursor to worsening weather - with the official start of the spring, the temperatures dropped to near freezing, the skies turned to mostly grey, and several short snowfalls made an appearance, melting instantly.
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It’s nothing short of amazing that I don’t impersonate Natasha-without-her-voice today. Try singing karaoke for a hundred songs in one sitting, and you’ll understand…
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Cold weather finally reached our land, too. For a couple of days in a row the temperature hovers around 25°F. The air is dry and windy, which makes it rather unpleasant.
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A whole new religion is being born, and Natasha is its prophet. The cult’s mantra is Happiness is when you have beets!
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Well, the car is parked in driveway, the wife and the kids are sleeping in their new beds - the new chapter in our life has officially commenced. And life is pretty damn good, at the moment (no little thanks to a bottle of nice Cotes-du-Rhone)…
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