Enter the Snarks!

I was going to write this when I knew for sure what was going on with the move to Moscow but I figured I would wait until I was a little calmer and had considered the situation better.

In anticipation of our visas coming through my wife had been talking to head of HR Europe, and head of European Operations at her company regarding the options if the visa news wasn’t good and they came up with the following options:-

1. Stay in the UK permanently.
2. Move to a new location until the work permit-like visa hopefully comes through in October (options immediately on the table were Geneva and Warsaw), then move to Russia.
3. Stay in the UK until the work permit-like visa hopefully comes through in October, and they would see if they could find me work inside the company on a temporary basis.
4. Move to a completely new location.

Well the visa came through and it said “????????? 90 ???? ?? ?????? 180” which means we can stay for 90 days in every 180, this wasn’t suitable for the company, and didn’t suit us any better. This was a massive blow to both of us, my first reaction after posting to Facebook and Twitter was to crave the kind of stability in the situation that could not be offered by either of the options that involved waiting for 6 months to go through this all again. Anyway after a few days chatting about it we have decided to stay in this country with the intention of going out to Moscow in September/October, but should a good job come up for me over here that is permanent then we will stay where that is based.

Ok now comes the rant/snarks:-

1. Why didn’t the company know the details of the visa they had applied for?
2. Why didn’t they know when they could apply for the work permit-like visa in the first place as all this started last October?
3. Why didn’t the company engage an immigration lawyer in Russia? – They would have been able to answer all the questions about visas
4. Why has it taken until now for the company to consider quite how they have turned our lives upside down?
5. Why couldn’t they have got their facts straight before I gave up my job and the job I had been offered elsewhere?

So the options open to me right now are really to get myself another job, or take a possible job the wife’s company might be able to offer me until we go. The former is going to be hard in the current economic climate as most of the jobs available in my specialisations are permanent positions that would preclude the move to Moscow in 6 months. The offer from her company seems to me to be a token gesture designed solely to placate her and stop her from leaving the company altogether and will ultimately come to nothing, but at least the perception will be that they have tried.

So another option for me whilst staying over here before we go is to take my photography more seriously, maybe do a few courses, and get some better equipment, actually this was suggested by my wife before I said I would wait to go to Moscow.  So this is what I am going to do:-

1. Look for a new job
2. Get a Canon 5D MKII and some decent lenses
3. Go on some photography courses

This last weekend confirmed this to me anyway as I realised that the villages in Oxfordshire are very photogenic, I am thinking of doing a series of shots of a lot of the pretty villages around here.

I welcome any feedback as to what people think I should do, but here are a couple of the photos I took this last weekend in Woodstock and Chipping Norton respectively:-

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 7th, 2009 at 9:39 pm. It is filed under Blog, Life, Photography and tagged with Decisions, Photography, UK, Visa, Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.