Nonwrestler Blog

Some Good Ol' Bureaucratic Nonsense

So I got a letter from IRD the other day. I paid off my student loan last year, and this letter said:

1. IRD had made interest write-offs on my student loan last year, which I wasn't entitled to because I wasn't living in NZ at the time.

2. They had now reversed each of 4 write-offs.

3. They had also reversed the reversals of the write-offs. i.e. made a one-off payment into my loan account to bring the balance back to zero.

4. They would be sending me a statement soon itemising what they were already telling me, but they just wanted to explain what I was about to see on my statement.

Then I got another 2 letters.

The first one was the statement, which:

1. Confirmed all of the above.

2. Had an opening balance of $2.78 in credit and a final transaction that was a debit of $2.78.

"Hang on, I thought, I've been gypped out of $2.78!"

The second letter was a cheque for $2.78.

Wonder what the difference is between that $2.78 and the costs associated with the write-offs made in error, the decision to reverse them, the discussions about how to record the reversal of the reversals, the typing out of the initial personalised letter and the subsequent processing and sending of the 3 letters...

Labels: life

Posted at 11:04  0 Comments Links to this post

Commuting in Tokyo

I guess a lot of people have heard stories of people getting packed into trains at rush hour in Japan. Here's a decent clip of what it actually looks and sounds like at a suburban station. So quiet!



Amanda and I did this for only a week or so when we first moved to Tokyo. I remember on the first day we just stood back in disbelief and watched 3 trains fill up and go past, but eventually had to surrender and just do it. In our case the station we were commuting from was the last on the line where you got in on that particular side, so for the rest of the trip more and more people were crammed in on the other side, forcing us back against the closed doors on our side more and more heavily. On that first day there was a tiny woman between Amanda and the door, and I remember the sound of the air forcibly escaping her lungs at every new station.

Labels: life, youtube

Posted at 11:20  1 Comments Links to this post

What's changed in Wellington

So, having been living outside New Zealand for 6 years, I was prepared for a bit of reverse culture shock coming back from Japan. When Amanda and I were blogging about our time in Tokyo people seemed to dig the reports on the little things that were different (others just wanted photos). So here's the local version - some of the stuff I've noticed about my hometown that may or may not have changed since 2001.

1. Massive increase in Kiwiana and NZ-themed t-shirts

Every time I leave the house I see someone wearing a t-shirt that has some emblem of New Zealand-ness on it. The most popular by a (country) mile is a map of NZ made up of tesselating shapes. The simple slogans "Born here" and "Home" seem popular among a raft of very clear statements of patriotism. Similar positive references to local areas are also pretty ubiquitious, including plenty about Newtown (a suburb of Wellington). Kitsch items of Kiwiana were pretty popular before I left, but a set of Kiwi emblems seems to have been established that crop up in every design shop. I'm thinking photos of baby fern fronds, pohutakawa blossoms, and windswept beaches with tussock on dunes. Silhouettes of koru, wetas, tikis and any of the native birds.
It's a funny one, I'm not sure how I feel about it all. I'm pretty distrusting of patriotic sentiments, but on the flipside the ubiquity of this stuff extends to most of my closest friends - and I'm pretty trusting of them. ;) Getting over our cultural cringe seems like a great thing. Being comfortable with where you are from, or where you are seems ace, but I get nervous about what happens next when that develops into pride. I guess Australia and Japan are both quite good places for instilling nerves on this topic... that "Born here" slogan might look pretty nasty in Australia, where 25% of the population isn't.

2. "I see fat people"

This was something I was expecting, really, but it's not the obese people that shocked me, just the general wobbliness of the population as a whole. Food portions seem almost offensively large, from ginormous coffees through heaped plates of noodles to every dessert being much more than I want. I remember the culture shock going to the States as a teenager and this is a very similar feeling. I can't help but feel it's a bad thing, that however healthy our diets get New Zealanders are just eating absolute shit-loads of food. Coming back in time for Christmas was not good if I was hoping to slowly adjust. ;)

3. Vege options = Cheese.

I went into a sandwich bar and they had 3 different vege options: one with brie, one with blue cheese, and one with something like gouda. Doesn't sit well with the above point about freaking out over fat. Seems like cheese is so often used as the defining feature of vege dishes, which is a massive contrast to Japan. Mind you, having three vege options in a sandwich bar is three more vege dishes than you'd get in many Japanese eateries. However it does seem like the number of options in Wellington has increased in the past however long, too. The average cafe will have vege, vegan, gluten free and whatever else dishes available and if not the staff are generally primed to provide options on request.

4. "Heat pumps"

OK, it's a small thing, but Japanese-made heat pumps have become popular things for Wellington houses. I'd never heard of a heat pump before, and certainly never seen one in Wellington, but soon found out all about them on the open home circuit. They're a relatively energy-efficient way to heat your house and fight the ubiquitous damp, by sucking in air from outside and heating it along the way. They looked strangely familiar to me, and it's because in Japan these exact same things are called air conditioners (well, "eerukon", to be more precise). They're advertised as an energy-efficient way to cool your house and fight the ubiquitous damp, by sucking in air from outside and cooling it along the way. Of course the things both cool and heat, but it just made me laugh that there was this funny new technology I'd never heard of, which turned out to be something I'd become so familiar with in Japan.

5. Tattoos

As with fatness, I expected that the omnipresence of tattoos was going to be a little odd after Japan, where the yakuza associations may be waning, but tattoos are not something most of the population would even consider. I have tattoos myself, so I'm not anti them in principle, but I must be honest I've been a bit appalled by the sheer volume of near-identical, surely-that-can't-hold-personal-importance type tats. Probably going to the gym doesn't help in that regard, because there's a neat correlation between the guys there who are trying to make their torsos into giant triangles and those who are covered in generic tats.

6. trademe

Like rugby, New Zealand's answer to EBay has fully entered the culture. You might hate it, might be indifferent, might love it to bits, but you know about it and have some opinion. Seems ridiculously popular and busy. I've found it pretty useful so far, but haven't got anything like hooked. I spend my "gah, bargain!" energy on that MP3 shop I wrote about in my last post.

Labels: life

Posted at 22:01  5 Comments Links to this post

House pics

Here are a few photos of our new house. They're the publicity pics taken by the agent, it's not our furniture or anything. Click thumbnails for bigger images.









Settlement's tomorrow... it was last Monday that we first looked at it.

Labels: life

Posted at 07:52  2 Comments Links to this post

House owning action

Amanda and I bought a house yesterday. It was our first time (hopefully the last for some time, too). Crazy process, crazy feeling, but very happy.

Labels: life

Posted at 09:50  2 Comments Links to this post