What's the difference?

A lot of people have asked me "how's the adjustment going," or, "have are you settling in?" These questions really invite only one answer - "very well, thanks", in much the same way that the classic "how are you doing?" is really not designed to elicit any answer more than "fine, you?".

But recently someone asked the question in a more open-ended way - "have you found anything really frustrating?" Hmm. Why yes, in fact, I have. The computer keyboard.

You see, I've been banging away on one keyboard or another for most of my life. I remember as a kid, dragging my mother's Olivetti Underwood manual typewriter up to my room to try to teach myself how to type. I figured if I typed the same letter over and over, I'd eventually learn. I didn't, though I did end up with a page full of A's for my effort.

Somewhere along the way, though, I did learn to touch type, though not very well. I have a hard time typing for long stretches, and sometimes my fingers just don't find the right keys and I still have to look down. (I've made about 15 mistakes in this paragraph so far). But I manage, or at least I did until I came here.

For starters, the @ and the " are reversed. So I'm forever Googling for @pubs in london@ and sending mail to drinkers"myfriends.com. As if that wasn't bad enough, the and \ keys, which I do use with some regularity in my profession, have been banished to the western frontiers of my keyboard, and reside in the same labor camp as the lower-class letters like Q and Z. This change was made, apparently, so that the Enter key could extend upwards. The result of this is that every time I mean to type a backslash, I end up hitting Enter. This is more than annoying, it's downright dangerous.

I'm not at all sure what happened to the curly braces ({}) or square brackets ([]), but that doesn't matter so much since I don't do a lot of programming any more. The pound sign (which is called a 'hash' sign here) is in a random spot, but the British pound sign (£) is in its place, so I guess that makes sense. The good old dollar sign is still above the 4, right where it belongs, though, so I take some comfort from that.

Apart from that, though, the adjustment isn't really too bad. Most of the other differences are just things to get used to. For example, it takes some getting used to stores closing at 7 on weeknights, and earlier on Sundays if they're open at all, and not being able to phone my bank at 2am on a Thursday is odd, though one might well ask why I don't have anything better to do at that time.

Many of you have also inquired about the time difference. If you're on the East Coast, we're 5 hours ahead. Except when we're not. You see, the US changed Daylight Savings Time to start 3 weeks earlier this year. This was the Bush administration's Big Idea to save energy. Seriously. Evidently no one bothered to figure out that if you shave an hour of daylight off the beginning of the day and tack it on to the end, people would have to turn on their lights in the morning instead of in the evening. Duh. Oh, and it cost something like a gazillion dollars for IT departments to fix. It was a mini Y2K, except no one spent two years planning for it. Who needs hydrogen cells when we've got Dubyah .

Anyway, for those three weeks in the Spring, the US is 4 hours behind the UK, until the UK switches to British Summer Time, and we're back to 5. If you're ever in doubt, www.timeanddate.com has a great timezone converter. The time difference isn't frustrating, exactly, but you really don't fully appreciate the magnitude of a 5 hour time difference until you're on the other side of it. People in the States don't start work until about 2pm my time, and then they expect that I'm going to be available until 5 or 6 pm Eastern (that's 10 or 11pm here, in case the math eludes you).

There's also the language difference. "Wait, what language difference" you ask. As well you might. I mean, we both speak English, right? Well, not exactly. English is slightly different here, just enough to make things a little complicated. There are the obvious differences, like loo for toilet and bum for butt, and other words that we think are funny. But then there are problematic differences, like when you need to use the loo, you ask for the toilet, not the restroom or the bathroom. After all, wou'd want to take a nap or a bath at work?

(note to grandma - you may want to skip to the next paragraph)
'Fanny' is a really obscene word here, while, oddly, 'fuck' is comparatively mild. When you come for a visit, don't bring a 'fanny pack', bring a 'bum bag' instead. Ass is arse, unless you're talking about a donkey (the animal type, not the investment banker type - they're arses). Busting someone's chops is 'taking the piss out of them', while taking a piss is 'having a slash'.

Some foods are different. Eggplants are aubergines, and zucchini is courgette. Or maybe I have it backward. I'm not a big fan of eggplant or zucchini, so not a big loss there. But what do you call London broil? Just broil? Children eat dinner early, and it's called children's tea. Which makes for some confusion for us Americans, since 'eat your tea, darling' sounds a little odd.

There are some expressions I just can't puzzle out and need someone to translate for me. 'Doing the messages' means grocery shopping. 'I'm not bothered' means I don't care one way or the other. 'Potty' means crazy, and I think there's a subtle distinction between 'quite good' and 'really good', though I don't know what it is yet.

Monetary denominations are somewhat confusing. The pound is divided into 100 pence. There are only £1 coins, no notes. For notes there are £5, 10, 20, 50 and 100. So far so good, right? But for coins, there are £1 and £2, and there are 1p, 2p, 5p, 10p, 20p and 50p. I'm not as fast at counting the change in my pocket as I should be, so I end up paying with a note, and just getting more change. By the end of the day, my pants are jangling around my ankles with the weight of all those coins.

These aren't annoyances, they're just trade-offs. They're things to get used to, and we will in time. But there are other things to get used to, too. It costs me just £105 a month to get to work and back. It would have cost me twice that in gas alone back in the States, not to mention car payments, maintenance and insurance. And then there's the travelling. Not that we've done much yet, but when people talk about going to the beach, they're talking about going to Greece to the beach or to the Canary Islands or to Sardinia. When they talk about going to the mountains, they mean the Swiss Alps. And when they talk about going to Octoberfest, they mean Munich. In October.

Yeah, I think the trade-offs are OK. Now if I could just find that damn backslash.