T-Dog

So I realized that I've written a lot about what I'm doing and what I'm finding interesting, but not a lot about Toby. A bunch of people have asked me how he's doing recently and it made me realize that I should do better. So...

T is doing an AWESOME job in his role of house-husband! And I mean that seriously. The past couple of weeks he has worked every day on getting our lives here set up. And it has not been easy. I tend to gloss over how complicated things are and just focus on the fun and happy stuff. But it truly had been very complicated to start getting established here.

To explain, here's a glimpse into Toby's day yesterday:

The mission: To print, sign, and scan a letter. The letter itself is part of a bigger hassle of getting one of our accounts set up so we can manage it from here. The printing of the letter is just a tiny part of the process (lots of phone calls, online forms, etc), but it's a good illustration of how things get complicated.

The first obstacle to overcome is that we don't have a printer yet. So, Toby tried to use the printer at the temporary apartment. It appears to work except that there is no ink. So the next strategy was to find a business that will let you print from a USB drive. First Toby went to the Post store, which is basically a post office but a lot more like a UPS store. There was a bit of a language barrier there, but eventually it became clear that they don't provide that service. However, they told there was a convenience store a couple blocks away where he could do it.

After locating the convenience store, Toby found a Chinese-speaking attendant and two ancient computers. The price for printing and scanning was 50 cents a page, so Toby got to work. However, as soon as he sat down to use the computer, he found that everything was in Chinese. And the worker had no interest in helping him since clearly the computers were a peripheral part of the business at best. Toby might have been the first customer to use them since 1992. But anyway, Toby muddled through the software as best as possible and eventually got his print and scan.

And so two hours after he started, he sat back down to send in the letter.

Unfortunately, this type of thing is pretty much par for the course. Toby had a good story one day about an Australian customer service rep singing into the phone while he was supposed to be fixing the access to Toby's cell phone account!

Long story short, everything gets a little more complicated and frustrating when you don't know your way around, don't have a car, don't have a lot of your stuff, and are figuring out how things work in a different country!

There is no way I could take care of this stuff and start my new job, so I am so lucky and thankful to have Toby covering all our bases.