6 August 2012 - Chipmunk in my ear

["Christmas Song" by Alvin and the Chipmunks]

If you've been following this blog since the very beginning, you may recall the Frantic for Fran blog regarding voice mail in Germany.  I ended the blog essentially pining away for one of the Cisco IP phones that I know and love.  Well, I now have a Cisco IP phone in Moscow and I still have telecom issues (through no fault of Cisco, I believe).

Let me preface this posting with a cultural note.  In the US, we like our voice mail.  It's convenient for when we're on another line, away from the phone or (let's be honest here) don't want to talk to whoever's calling or think that the "Unknown" number is a telemarketer.  This leads to very good corporate voicemail systems that, for example:

• Allow you to send a voicemail to a colleague without having to call them directly (for example, if they're busy and you don't want to interrupt them or it's just easier to leave a voice mail than to type something out in an email that might be misinterpreted or, worse yet, forwarded)
• Forward messages received to other colleagues (which admittedly subverts one of the pluses of voicemail above, though there is the "private" option that prevents forwarding)
• Send messages to a group of people at one time (e.g. "Hey, everyone in my team, here's something you should know [and I know you don't read all your emails]")
• Respond back to a voice mail without having to call the person (this saves a lot of time and money, particularly when you're traveling or don't have a piece of paper to write down the person's number etc.)
• Send an e-mail to you when you have voice mail so you know when to dial in
• Allow you to call in from "local" dial-in numbers in multiple countries

This is the kind of goodness I'm used to.  We only had maybe one or two of those features in Germany.    And German voice mail is a rock star compared to Russia.

But the other part of the cultural note is the reality in Russia, which seems to be that you always pick up your phone when someone calls.  It doesn't matter if you're in a meeting, if you're on a different line or (as I have seen in action) are in the bathroom.  No need for voice mail.  Uhhh.....  To me this was shocking.  I've always been taught that if you take a call when you're with or talking to someone else, it signals that the person calling is more important than the one you're talking to (which is to say, it's rude).  You avoid being rude by saying in advance, "I'm expecting an important call from my [client, boss, wife, etc.) and will need to take that" or noting when that person calls that it's X and would you mind if you take the call quickly?  And it is for this very reason that the "Send all calls" button exists - so you can block out interruptions when you're on an important call or in a meeting.

Not so in Russia where there is neither a Send all Calls button or an ability to divert a call to your assistant.  In fact, it turns out that even when I was on a call, the inbound call would not go to voicemail.  Instead, it would be routed to my assistant.  If she didn't pick up, it went to the other administrative assistant.  If she didn't pick it up, it went back to assistant, and on and on until either someone picked up or the caller hung up. It never came back to me nor did it go to voice mail.  When I discovered this, I asked to please have all of my calls go to voice mail if I wasn't available.  I was met with a kind of stunned silence.  My assistant said she'd look into it.  It turns out this required direct intervention from IT to reprogram this for me.  Seriously?  But I now have voice mail, though when it plays the messages, it seems to do so in double-time, so it's kind of like listening to a chipmunk talking. Not so good.

So that pretty much covers the situation for incoming calls.  Outgoing calls is an entirely different matter.  If the number you're calling is a local Moscow landline with a 495 prefix, it's easy - just dial a 0 and enter the numbers after the 495 and you'll be connected.  It gets a bit complicated if it's a mobile phone, a "toll free" number or, heaven forbid, a number in a different country.

In those instances, you have to go to a menu on the Cisco phone.  First, you have to indicate whether it is a long distance call or whether it is an internal call to one of our selected offices globally that have VOIP (Voice over IP) calling.  The latter option is actually pretty cool.  You scroll down the list of countries (Germany is #1 - just sayin', though USA is at the very bottom at #23 but which is a jersey number of a certain former Chicago Bulls player, so I'm okay with that) and select the country of interest.  In most cases, you then just type in the last five digits of the phone number and you're put right through and it comes up locally with at least your last name rather than a long, off-putting (and perhaps intriguing) string of numbers beginning with 007 (+7 being the country code for Russia).  If you select the US, though, you then get to scroll through all the cities where we have offices.  Apparently, I am the only person who sees the beauty of this as apparently no one had raised the issue that the alphabetic listing of cities ended somewhere after Boston, thus neglecting such key cities as Chicago and, yeah, New York.  All pretty magical - and has to be much less expensive than dialing directly.  More on cost-of-calling in a moment.

If you're not calling an internal number, though, you must choose from a separate menu of three choices:  Chargeable, non-chargeable and private.  Now, at any given point in time, there are probably 10-12 projects open in my name that I may be working on.  I don't know all of the eight-digit engagement codes by heart, so I usually just choose non-chargeable (and also because, as many of you may know, I really don't like to talk on the phone, but prefer a quick e-mail).  And with very rare exceptions, I don't make personal phone calls from the office, particularly with the time difference to the US and lack of time to make any friends locally.    Even so, though, it is a hassle to just make a phone call.

The import of all of this came to haunt me sometime in April, though, when I got my first electronic phone bill through the firm.  For my land line, it lists every single call I've made and asks me to provide the related internal or client charge code.  Line by line.  Failure to do so results in everything being classified as "Private" and being deducted from my paltry salary.  Good incentive to "encourage" review, I have to admit.  But honestly, I have no idea who I called and many do not match up with appointments on my calendar.  Hmmm....  Difficult.  And very time-consuming.  It reinforced the beauty of using the VOIP options to other options, though, as they're "free" or at least not listed on the chart of my calls.

The same is required of my BlackBerry.  This gets more difficult because you also have to indicate the right code for incoming calls and who knows who has called me from which numbers?  And then there's a blanket charge for the data service and you can't really allocate that to anything in particular.  I know I'm not surfing the internet with the horrible BlackBerry browser, so it's a bunch of emails that could relate to anything on any given day.  But about a month ago, I learned how ridiculously expensive roaming is on my current plan.  In one month I had been in Stockholm, Budapest, Amsterdam, London and the US and my resulting phone bill was about RUB 100,000 or about $3,000.  Yikes!  I think that is more than I had even when I was in China for an entire month!  Half of that was data, but the other part was a bit ambiguous as usual.  I entered the calls that I thought made sense and submitted for reimbursement.  But it wasn't approved.  Not denied, just not approved.  And they took all of it out of my paltry payroll here (recall, I only get per diems here).  Ouch!  Still working on that.  Not at all pleased....

And don't even get me started about not having an instance conference call number to use.  The best we have is to set something up with only a Russian dial-in.  Not a big crowd-please for international calls....

5 August 2012 - The Reality of Relocating to Moscow (Part 3)

The kitchen (Lads sold separately)

You may breathe a sigh of relief -- this is the last of a three-part series on the sometimes boring and laborious details of what is really involved in relocating from Germany to Russia on short notice.

[And let me first note my anger at Blogger for making me re-write this as I already did so, saved and posted but to no avail!]

Prior to moving to Germany, I had three apartments in my lifetime -- my Glen Ellyn ghetto, the Wauwatosa wonder and of course Hazzard County (which was located in Kane County, to be clear).  The great thing about being a renter was that it was so easy.  I found a place, put a deposit down, paid my rent on time, renewed the lease each year, gave the proper notice prior to leaving, ensured the apartment was clean upon departure, and then collected the deposit (usually in total).  You can probably deduce from the mere point that I am noting this that this was not the same in German.  You would be correct in that deduction, Sherlock (or would that be Dr. Watson?).

Now, I had known in advance that three months notice is required prior to leaving and you have to pay for the apartment during that three month period unless the landlord is able to rent it out before the end of that three month period (assuming, of course, you vacate the premises before the end of said three month period).  That seems fair to me.  What I hadn't anticipated was that you couldn't actually do the "hand over" of the apartment when you actually vacated it.  And you have to do the handover in person.  This posed a potential problem as I was leaving German at the end of February (or early March, as it turned out) but the three month notice period ended at the end of April.  Fortunately, the relocation consultant provided by the firm (I'll call her Anike) would be able to do this in my place.  She was also the one handling all of the matters that follow as they required fluency in German.  No idea how I would have been able to do this without her assistance!

A quick note that is relevant to this discussion relates to my landlord.  As you may recall, my apartment was new construction and I think when I first moved in, I was actually paying rent to the developer because the entire property development had not yet been completed.  Sometime in the first year, it was transferred to the real estate arm of Commerzbank which then became the landlord/property manager.  Didn't really seem to matter other than in terms of changing who got the rent each month.  Well, actually, it turns out it does matter because no matter how much Mitt Romney claims that corporations are people, too, they have slightly different needs and demands than does a landlord who is just an individual.

Anyway, one of the complications of this handover thing from a timing perspective is that the landlord insisted that the final cleaning be performed not when I moved out, but just prior to the handover but after the painting and should also include window cleaning.  Ugh.  So I had to hope that my cleaning lady (who is very nice) would be available at some undetermined point near the end of April (or sooner, if the landlord found a new tenant) and would take payment in advance.  Which she did.  So all good.

Wait.  What painting?!  I didn't paint any walls while I was there, so what's there to do?  Oh, yeah....  There's some requirement that the apartment should be painted every 8-10 years or something.  So if you move out before that time, you have to get an estimate of the cost to repaint the entire unit, get that estimate approved by evil corporate landlord,  have the repainting done and pay a portion of the painting fee based on the amount of time I have occupied the apartment.  Ridiculous.  This ended up costing nearly EUR 900.

At some point during my tenancy, I had dropped my iron on the hardwood floor, resulting in a divot in the floor of no more than a centimeter at it's widest point.  Evil corporate landlord also demanded that this be repaired.  So Anike found a floor repair specialist, got a quote, arranged for him to do the repair, and I paid another EUR 135 for the privilege of having lived in the apartment.

As noted in the last moving post, I hadn't had much time to get rid of my power/voltage dependent items and this included my washer and dryer.  Anike noted that we could ask the real estate agent who was listing the apartment to offer this for sale to the new tenant, though of course this wouldn't be a guarantee.  I figured that might be a good idea, though the backup plan was to give the items to my amazing neighbors who were in the process of establishing a second residence in Hamburg and might need an extra set of appliances (though admittedly many Germans don't see the need for a dryer).  I had paid about EUR 900 for both and they had been used all of once or twice a week, so nearly new.

Anike then asked what I wanted to do about the kitchen and closet system.  Um, what do you mean?  She explained that the evil corporate landlord wouldn't buy the kitchen because, essentially, they didn't want to deal with the appliances or something breaking down and being responsible.  So I could either offer these for sale to the new renter or PAY TO HAVE THE KITCHEN DISASSEMBLED AND PUT ON THE STREET AS TRASH (which I'd have to do if the new renters didn't want to buy it)!  Excuse me?!  I paid about EUR 7,000 for this kitchen and it was still perfectly fine.  This just boggled my mind.

The same applied to the rather nice, custom-ordered closet system that was the topic of an early blog in Germany.  I think I paid about EUR 2,500.  Had I known that this would be an issue, I would have had the movers pack it up and move it to the US as I would love to have it as an off-season storage unit for clothes in the basement or garage or something.  Alas, I didn't know about this until the movers were actually gone.  Grrr....

The prospect of paying to have the kitchen and closet system disassembled became a real one as, just one week before the handover, there still wasn't a new tenant.  So I had to either get the stuff out and if I didn't, then the evil corporate landlord would arrange to have it done and would bill me for their efforts.  Fortunately, just in the nick of time they found a renter.  The renter agreed to buy the kitchen and the appliances for a total of EUR 1,500 but they didn't want the closet system, so I had to pay EUR 215 to have someone disassemble it, though fortunately I didn't have to pay for the cost of arranging for trash removal because the painter (!) saw it and said he'd like it.  Unbelievable.

Oh, and evil corporate landlord also hit me up for an additional EUR 560 for some Grundsteuer (tax) that I thought they should have brought up a long time ago, but clearly I will never understand real estate transactions in Germany.

Remind me again why I am paying for the "privilege" of paying to move to Russia on short notice and being ripped out of my nice life in Germany?  Let's just hope that some of these costs and losses can be deductible as moving costs!