On Wednesday I moved into the “International House”. It seemed a reasonably nice house and that it would tide me over to after Christmas by which team I’d hopefully be more confident about staying. The house has a small kitchen, two lounges, each with a TV, two bathrooms and although two were unoccupied. My bedroom was large enough with a desk, a wash basin and a closet. Although staying at Mark’s was OK and his family are cool, it was obviously not a long term solution and it was nice to get out from under their feet.
Apart from moving in the week was mainly filled with more adminy stuff and generally just settling in. Mark also set up an account for me on one of the PCs in the office which made for much easier internet browsing and allowed me to make a couple of calls using Skype. Getting a university ID card started to become a bit of a saga, in part thanks to the much delayed offer letter and by the end of the week I still didn’t have one. I also started the process of getting the usual 30-day health insurance waiting period waived so that I could be covered by the university’s insurance from the beginning of December and not pay another month’s myself.
As I’m writing this several months later I’m not sure what I did on the weekend and e-mails I sent at the time are no help. I think that on the Saturday I got on the bus down to where a lot of the larger chain stores are located south of town to pick up some food and check out what was there and that on Sunday I didn’t do much apart from have a walk around the nearer bits of town.
My second week was only a three day week due to the long Thanksgiving holiday. On the Monday I went to the Social Security people and thankfully was indeed in their system. They said I should come back in a couple of days which I thought would allow me to get on payroll before Thanksgiving as I could get the number Wednesday morning and then go to payroll. I got the number fine only to find out that the only guy in the office who could put me on payroll had taken the day off and so I couldn’t get on payroll to the next week thus missing the pay run which was mildly annoying.