a bizarre land

you know as much as I love London and as much as they are supposed to be an advanced civilization, there are certain (legacy?) things that I find completely bizarre, mostly related with English bureaucracy. take for example banking. now in our little sorry excuse for a nation i can still walk into a bank and get an account in at most a couple of days. here, they tease you. first it takes a week to get your account. and then another week to get your card. and then another week for a pin number (which may or may not work). and somewhere in there you'll get one letter with your internet pin, another with your customer number, another with the policy booklets. its like dealing with a well seasoned stripper who knows how to tease you and prolong your pleasure. except in this case its not pleasure but A BLOODY PAIN IN THE ASS!

oh and then there's the fiasco with the TV license. for those of you not in the know, the moment you have a TV in your room/house/box under a bridge by the Thames, you need a TV license, which is like 130 or so quid. and they're really anal about it too. Now I am fortunate to not have had to deal with this, but I was just speaking to two people who had a run-in with the TV licensing people. they both got letters saying "you do not have a TV license. if you do not have a TV, please call us." ... with all the usual threats of fines and shit. so one of them diligently calls them up, and from what i gather the conversation went something like this:

a: I don't have a TV
tv peeps: what do you mean you dont have a TV?
a: I just don't have a TV
tv peeps: how can you not have a TV? everyone has a TV
a: well i dont have one, i dont have money for one
tv peeps: are you planning on getting one?
a: well if you'd be kind enough to make a donation i might consider it
tv peeps: ok fine. but i'll be stopping by to inspect your place

the other guy was even better. he lives in a dorm and his letter said "your ROOM xxx does not have a TV license ....

oh yeah and this isnt just limited to TVs. anything that can get a TV signal needs a TV license. so if your laptop has a TV tuner, you need a license. Heck, if your bloody refrigerator could get a TV signal, you'd need a bloody license. now, we figure that the cost of maintaining that bureaucratic structure to track and enforce these things, is most probably much higher than the actual revenue from the licenses. i mean, where else in the world do you need a tv license? even in our sorry little nation we dont need one.