Sunday, April 26, 2009

taxes! and visas (not credit cards)

Don't worry, I paid them months ago. Well, I got a refund months ago and it was glorious. I used it to help stimulate the American economy by saving it and then moving out of the country. The fact that April 15th came and went was so essentially meaningless to me. In other news, I'm finally on my new cost center for work so now I technically work here even though I've had a visa for more than a month.

Speaking of visas, I had a moderately amusing experience at the border of another country last week which will remain nameless to protect something, perhaps our top secret business plans. I was with my manager who is not from a European country. I, being the intrepid and beloved American, was allowed easy entry into this country where I do not need a visa (where I actually went over a month ago on an initial client visit). My visa-less manager was not so fortunate and so we turned around, went back to the Hungarian border controls, and dropped him off. (Don't worry, transportation for him to get back to Szeged was arranged. It's not like I left him there all day.) In all fairness, he didn't think he needed a visa for two basic reasons. The first is that he was pretty sure he didn't need one based on past experience. The second was that he called our travel agency just to make sure and they said he didn't need a visa. But times change. Well, they changed on Janauary 1, 2009 when his country and/or this country decided that a visa was now required for people from his country to enter into that country.

This actually reminds me of the multiple visas in the passport of one of our engineer trainees. He's from Turkey and has five different pages in his passport given up to visa pages. And they're not even close to being in chronological order. I'm not sure what it is about people who get to put stuff in passports, but there must be some enormous practical joke where they deliberately use stamps with barely any ink and never put them in order. Or if it is in order, they've skipped several pages.

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