Thank you for your time and attention.

As will probably have been apparent when I was last posting way back last Autumn, I wasn’t in a very positive frame of mind about this whole ‘being San Franciscan’ thing, and frankly, haven’t really felt inspired to chat happily about living here on the blog.

Things didn’t improve, and to be honest, after trying repeatedly to find a way to get them to improve, or at least to be resolved, I finally decided I’d had enough of being messed around, and so I’ve resigned.  I’ll be back in the UK in a little over a month, and out in the big wide world of trying to find a job.

And even though that’s a bit scary, I also feel like a huge weight has been lifted.  Which tells me I’ve made the right call.

So with a slightly more positive feeling again at last, I might actually do some updating here to cover the lead-up to being (Fairly) Suddenly Not San Franciscan.

On the upside from then, The Mrs is now here in SF with me, which is a huge bonus over last year.  The cat being here (especially in his current unnaturally affectionate mode) is also a plus.

We just got back from a short holiday, which was both lovely and massively needed, and I’ll write about that shortly, so that was good, but the fact that it was the first serious break (excluding overnights and the odd long weekend) in well over a year is telling.

And we’re living in San Francisco, which is obviously as I’ve previously noted A Good Thing (though I still need to do better about being ‘of the city’.)

More broadly, I can’t honestly dredge up much enthusiasm for our current lot.  I’ll be frank, work isn’t ideal.  I just wrote, but have now deleted, a long paragraph about why it’s not that discretion suggested I shouldn’t publish.  Let’s just say this isn’t the job I agreed to take when I moved us over here, and it’s been getting further away from that job pretty much ever since I arrived.

Don’t get me wrong - it’s better than not having a job, obviously, and I’m not daft enough to think otherwise, especially the way the world is right now.  But I feel unmotivated and unchallenged, which is not ideal, and in large measure I feel guilty for having uprooted us all for no really good reason.

So this is definitely a better birthday, but looking back, I can’t help thinking that last year’s was something of an omen for what was to come.

“Yikes”, I thought, I’ve woken a sleeping monster and a screaming mob are baying at my blog demanding my head for comparing the UK system favourably with the US.  Given the attitude of some of the town hall protester types, I was actually slightly nervous about checking out the messages.

Turns out I needn’t have worried.

The nine comments were all actually trackbacks from people trying to sell a certain kind of product I referenced (I won’t reference it again, because it might happen again, but it rhymes with ‘testicles’, sort of).  Who’d have thought that that industry was so particularly aggressive with their fake blogging?

And they’re all so sweet too - “A well-regarded blogger had this to say about…”, “A great source of information blogged on the subject….”.  I didn’t know I was so highly regarded :-)

“This system is broken and needs fixing”.

Part one - a sudden spectacle crisis means The Mrs needs to get new glasses.  Not a huge worry as I’m pretty sure we have some form of coverage for this based on my work insurance.  And indeed we do.  Turns out it’s 10% off the eye test and 10% off the glasses.  Which, assuming the local optician isn’t a total rip-off merchant, makes the test $90+ (around £60) and the glasses, well, we’ll have to see.  I only found this out after contacting three different organisations to work out exactly who deals with the vision part of the coverage, by the way.

Cost of an eye test in the UK, where you just walk into any high street optician and no one has to call anyone to work out who’s paying - between £17 and £30 depending on where you go; lots of groups get them free, and everyone in Scotland does too.

Part two - As I’ve blogged before, I have asthma.  Except for the fortunately rare occasions when I have a major attack, my asthma is pretty mild, and generally managed by inhalers that for a lot of the time I never need to use.  It’s mild enough in fact that the supply of inhalers I picked up back in the UK in February has lasted me perfectly well ever since.  However, I’m now running low, and about to be travelling (again), so rather than risk running out while I’m away, I needed to sort out a US prescription.

Setting aside that some of this system is going to be complex to me simply because I haven’t grown up with its nuances, the effort involved in again, finding out what’s covered, by whom, how I need to deal with it, what information I need to give to the various providers, seemed excessive.  Having eventually established that a particular doctor I had had recommended accepted the insurance cover I have, and that the insurance company accept him as a real doctor, I went along and paid the $150 registration fee, had a fifteen minute consultation, and on leaving, paid $15 which is the ‘co-pay’ on our work policy.  I actually don’t know how much the rest of the bill was that the insurance company are picking up.  But handing over a payment card at the end of a GP appointment?  Oh my god did that feel wrong.  Actually ‘made-my-stomach-churn-slightly’ wrong.

And then to a pharmacist.  Which I had to specify, because the doctor sends my prescription to them, rather than giving it to me (for Americans, in the UK we’re given the prescription and can take it to any pharmacy).  This is actually, broadly, a good idea - the doc lists three refills of the prescription that I can request direct from the pharmacy without having to go back for a new prescription.  This one little bit of the process is wonderfully logical, and I approve.

Happily, having sorted this out I went along to the designated pharmacy and asked for my prescription, which was already made up and waiting for me.  “$299 and change, please”, said the Pharmacist.  Who then actually took a step back, so violent was my double take.

Turns out you have to tell your pharmacist who your insurance provider is, too.  I didn’t know that and didn’t have the details with me, so had to go back to the office, retrieve them and then return.  Once they were in the system and validated, via the $25 co-pay for each the $300 was reduced to $50.

So if I was the kind of serious asthmatic who needs this prescription monthly or even more, even with insurance I’m looking at an annual bill of at least $600 - without it, I’d be staring at $3600 a year just to control my chronic condition.  And people are usually without insurance because they can’t afford it in the first place. So where you get that kind of money from is anyone’s guess.

Again, to compare.  When I get a prescription in the UK, the prescription gives me a couple of each of my inhalers at a time, and each type of item (not each item) costs £7.20, so I can get twice as many inhalers for £14.40 ($24) as I can get for $50.  That’s without any kind of insurance. And potentially I can get more - when I was being moved over here for three months initially last year, I told my GP I was going to be working abroad for three months and he wrote me a prescription for double the quantities so I wouldn’t run short.  The cost was still just two lots of the individual prescription cost.

And again, by the way, lots of people across the UK qualify for free prescriptions.  For example, a friend of mine is diabetic, and as a consequence, any prescription she ever needs, not just those relating to her diabetes, is free.

The US system is complex (I’d argue needlessly so), expensive (Oh yes, I also pay quite a bit of money a month towards our cover, as does my employer), inequitous, inflexible, and by every account I hear, run entirely for the insurers’, rather than the patients’, benefit, and to their arcane rules.

The NHS is far from perfect.  It’s also expensive to the state, and even then it’s underfunded.  But it’s “free at the point of need”.  For EVERYONE, not just people who can afford it, and not just for people who live in the right neighbourhoods, or work for the right employers.  And it’s staffed by dedicated professionals who I assume love the fact that they don’t have to ask some faceless insurance company if it’s okay to do so before they save someone’s life.

Every single time I hear some know-nothing ranting about the nightmare of British healthcare compared to the perfection of the US system, my temptation is to shout at the screen.  But in the interests of my own well being and keeping my blood pressure down, I’ve adopted a policy of writing posts like this, that might inform a few people, and smiling knowingly to myself that one day I’ll grow old under the aegis of a healthcare system that won’t care if I’m worth one quid or a million.

Like Senator Chris Buttars of Utah, who says he will block a proposed inclusive Salt Lake City anti-discrimination bill because, and this is a direct quotation:

“I don’t think the discrimination they scream about is really real”.

This in Salt Lake City, home of the Mormons, who effectively bankrolled the Proposition 8 campaign last year and appear to be working similarly hard to overturn gay marriage legislation in Maine.

And this is Senator Chris Buttars, whose anti-gay comments are sufficiently inflamatory that he was reprimanded by Senate leaders for them, and removed from his position as Chair of the Judicial Standing Committee by his own (Republican) party.  The Chris Buttars who has blocked one pro-gay measure after another while actively advocating for anti-gay measures.

But there’s no real discrimination, apparently.  What would you call it, then Senator?  Just plain old bigotry and hatred?

I’m saddened for several reasons:

One is that in the context of causes near and dear to me, the LGBT communities have never had another ally in the Senate to compare with him.  And we’re obviously only part of his constituency.  To quote President Obama’s statement on his death:

“For five decades, virtually every major piece of legislation to advance the civil rights, health and economic well being of the American people bore his name and resulted from his efforts.”

And I’m saddened that the first serious attempt to achieve his decades-long dream of some kind of universal healthcare for all Americans wasn’t completed in time for him to see it, and even more saddened that he had to see, even as he knew he was dying, the ‘debate’ around such an admirable goal cheapened and denigrated with the kind of lies, aggression and outright contempt as has been the case.

But oddly, the thing that saddens me most has its roots decades ago.  I don’t even remember what the occasion was, but I was a kid back in the UK, and the Senator was featured on the news for some reason.  I didn’t know who he was, though obviously the family name was familiar, and I asked my mother about him.  I’m not sure exactly how she responded in the context of the specific news item, but I do remember her talking about him in a negative way, based on one specific incident/scandal (come on, you know the one, and I’m certainly not going to spoil this post by linking off to anything about it), suggesting that he was a poor excuse in comparison to his brothers.

This was obviously before a lot of what’s now known was known, but the thing that I’m most saddened by in all this is that my mother probably never had any reason to know the detail of his career in the Senate since that incident, probably doesn’t know to this day of the very many admirable things he achieved and attempted, or the respect in which he was held by both political allies and opponents alike.  I’m sure she’s not the only one whose overriding associations when she hears the name are suspicion and contempt.

And that’s no legacy for someone who did as much as Ted Kennedy for as many people, and for the principles of fairness and community that should define this country.

I really don’t want to give too much of the plot of this one away, so I’ll summarise what is revealed in the documentary style opening few minutes:

Twenty years ago, a massive alien mothership arrived on Earth and settled itself into the sky above Johannesburg.  It made no sign or further move, and eventually a South African force boarded it, finding thousands of malnourished, apparently leaderless aliens.  These visitors were settled into a shanty town/slum on the edge of the city called District 9.  Twenty years later, their numbers growing and tensions between the locals and these ‘Prawns’ (as they’re known) growing with them, it’s decided that the aliens need to be resettled to another camp several hundred miles outside the city.  The job is given to a multinational corporation, and the role of overseer to the operation is given to what is clearly a mid-level office drone called Wikus Van Der Merwe.

Even that pseudo documentary sows suggestions that bad things happened as a result of the operation, and the rest of the film shows what they were.  Along the way, the film becomes a political story, a conspiracy thriller, a romance, a very strange buddy movie, and possibly most unexpectedly, an action movie, with Wikus its unlikely action hero.

Those who’ve seen the trailer will have seen the handheld style and naturalistic look that could potentially mark this out as this year’s Cloverfield, but that superficial similarity doesn’t do District 9 justice.  Don’t get me wrong, I liked Cloverfield. But it lacks anything approaching the complexity and originality on display here.

It’s not, perhaps, an easy film to watch.  It’s graphically violent (though in an almost comic, over the top style), and what happens to Wikus is unpleasant on many levels.  But it’s a film that makes you think, and there aren’t enough of those around, and it’s crafted superbly, from the integration of the effects through to the overall filming style, to the plot and script to the performances.  There are a couple of big unanswered questions concerning the set-up at the start of the film that bothered me a little as I was watching (no spoilers), but generally the fate of the Prawns in the twenty years since their arrival is all too familiar from years of news footage of one displaced population or another.

In many ways, it’s also a film that is uniquely South African - the shadow of apartheid hangs over the film as much as the alien ship hangs over the city, and director/co-writer Neill Blomkamp is obviously not blind to the connections.

Sci-fi, as I’ve remarked before, is at its best when it uses its milieu to cause its audience to think about the real world.  District 9 is an outstanding example of that, and I highly recommend it.  It’s bleak, but ultimately uplifting, and if you need your sci-fi to have big zap guns and explosions, it even offers plenty of those.

The signs were never propitious:  two separate trips to two different parts of the country spanning three days and six flights (including connections).  The first trip involved driving down to San Jose to catch a flight, then back up from there late the same day; the next trip involved a 5.40am flight out of San Francisco, an overnight stay, a two and a half hour drive and a two-sector flight back from a different airport.  When you rack up the things that could potentially have gone wrong, they’re relatively numerous.

In some ways it almost feels like even more things went wrong than I was expecting.  I won’t do the whole saga, because it’s just too depressing, but I will cite the joy of turning up at an airport for the flight back (part 1) on Wednesday night to be told it was cancelled and I’d been rebooked for the following day as the point at which I knew this was the worst week of travel ever.  And I’ve had some contenders for that prize.

What I will note though is the way this whole process works.  I’ve been thinking about this a lot as I whiled away time jammed in a middle seat between a large woman on one side and a shockingly smelly man on the other, or waited in airports to see if I would get on to the flight or not.

I think I’ve been spoiled by the fact that so much of my travel is on international routes with carriers like British Airways and Virgin Atlantic, and they just take more time and trouble.  The US domestic market is a totally different kettle of fish.  Or class of cattle.

To begin with, the way flights are oversold makes no sense to me.  Not the fact that it happens - I understand it probably better than most people, because I’ve worked for an airline.  But perilously close to twenty years ago when I did so, that airline (it’s the one mentioned above that’s mostly referred to by its initials), already had the practice down pretty much to a science.  You could turn up at the start of a shift with a major flight (say the first flight of the day from Heathrow to JFK) looking scarily oversold, and by the time it actually took off there would be a handful of free seats.  That was impressive.

US domestic airlines, on the other hand, appear to have eschewed science in favour of the time-honoured method of thinking of a number then doubling it.  In the last six weeks I’ve been held unable to “obtain a seat assignment” until the flight closed no fewer than six times, and every one of those flights left people behind (including me once) .  I know the scale and complexity is different.  I know this.  But I still don’t see why it’s so hard.

And when the flights are canceled, as occasionally and inevitably happens, people seem just to lay down and let the airline wheel a baggage trolley over them.  When I arrived to find my flight to Minneapolis canceled and that I’d been rebooked for the following day, I had a conversation with the ticket desk guy and he found me an alternative routing on another airline that same day.  I was very happy with this service, shook his hand, and have mailed his company to say how pleased I was with his service.  Conversely, at the desk next door a couple wheeled an elderly man up because his flight somewhere else had been scrapped, were told to come back the following day (when a seat may be available on a flight), and with a resigned sigh they turned away, saying “we’d better find a hotel for the night then”.

So is that it then?  Are US domestic passengers so used to flights being canceled and seats rebooked with no consultation that it’s just regarded as the norm?  Because if I turned up for a BA or Virgin flight that had been canceled, I’m fairly sure I’d get a little more explanation and support than that.  In fact, I know I would, because I have.

Pam at Pam’s House Blend has an occasional series of posts involving one airline or another screwing up her plans, so I’m trying to work out if it’s unusual enough that it’s worthy of note or so commonplace that it’s more of a “latest chapter in the saga” thing.  From her tone, probably the latter.

Please don’t get me wrong.  I really do know that running a fleet of ‘planes across a complex hubbing operation like those the US carriers tend to operate is astonishingly complex, and often the things that go wrong (as things inevitably will) are totally outside their control.  In this week’s case, huge storms had totally shut down an airport.  No one can help that.

But when you pile up the general lack of support or communication, the frequency of (bad) overbooking and the generally terrible level of in-flight service you get on these carriers, an act of god seems like the last nail in the coffin.  At least there are a few high quality alternatives, like Virgin America, but their route network is still so limited it’s hard to regard them as a real option for a lot of journeys.

I love flying.  I love planes.  But it’s getting harder and harder to sustain that enthusiasm of late.

Last night Rachel Maddow took a look at some of the prominent “healthcare reform is a secret plot to kill old people” voices and highlighted their rank hypocrisy.

Even they don’t believe it.