Got my US temporary work permit, but-

Okay, so my wife and I were on our way somewhere and we stopped off at the mailbox to see if we’d got any parcels or correspondence and there was a letter from the USCIS in there.  I must admit that I was a little worried.  I got my 2 year green card in August, which should be all I need for working and travel and should have meant that I was free from any immigration concerns, at least for now - so why were the US authorities writing to me?

I consider myself to be pretty scrupulous when going through all the bureaucracy that officialdom throws at me, but there is so much of it, it crossed my mind that I’d missed sending in a form, or neglected to provide some crucial piece of evidence, or even worse, I’d let something expire, and the USCIS were writing to tell me of the terrible consequences.

But no, when I opened the letter, I found a plastic card inside and a letter saying that here was my temporary work permit.  It was completely useless of course, given that I already had my green card.  The temporary work permit is something that you are supposed to get whilst you are waiting for your green card.  When I checked the dates on the card I couldn’t help but be wryly amused – it was valid from May 2011 until April 2012!

That made it approximately 9 months late!

Oh well, I guess that gives me 3 months to use it before it expires.

3 big British and American differences (funny)

Okay, this is just for fun, so nobody get upset or anything, here are my 3 big British and American differences (funny):

1.  Us Brits love to moan.  If it is raining, we moan because it is too wet.  If the sun comes out, we moan because it is too hot.  In short, we carp about everything.  We don’t expect any solutions, we just like to whine on about how crap everything is.  Moan in the presence an American, however, and they will immediately attempt to find a solution to the perceived problem.  In the can-do, optimistic culture of the US, problems are there to be solved.  They really don’t grasp that in the UK, complaining for the sake of it is accepted as a subtle art form and the idea of all our troubles being solved actually slightly horrifies us.

2.  Customer service is highly developed in the US, but almost non-existent in the UK, where supermarket checkout assistants will usually only smile at Christmas time and adopt miserable expressions for the rest of the year.   Although it is great to have such a friendly and attentive service in the US, American customers do take advantage sometimes (at least by British standards) especially in restaurants where they sometimes request so many changes to the dish that’s being offered on the menu, you do wonder whether it’s worth having a menu at all?  I mean if you ask for a chicken dish without the chicken, or that the chef substitutes blue cheese for bacon, it does kind of make it into a completely different meal, doesn’t it?  If you did that in the UK, they’d probably tell you to eff off!

3.  Brits love to swear, or “cuss” as they call it in the US.  It is tough for a Brit to utter an entire paragraph without at least one f-word in it.  Women, children and older people will all participate, given half a chance.  Swearwords/cuss words are treated more seriously in the USA and censored from most TV programmes, this means that watching Gordon Ramsay in the US is just a series of bleeping sounds.  Sex is another thing that Americans are generally uptight about (though not so much down here in Florida where everyone walks around half naked).  As Brits, we are used to being castigated for our “sexual repression” by our more adventureful neighbours, the French and Dutch, but over here in the US, Brit culture seems relatively liberated.  Americans are much more tolerant of violence and guns however and you are free to watch people being shot to death on TV at any time of night or day.  Unless the gunman or victim happens to be making love or uttering an f-word at the time of the shooting, in which case the scene will be censored.