The Trinity

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You may think you know what the trinity is. You are wrong. Let me inform you of one more fun aspect of moving to the UK: bank accounts. You see, I had heard that they weren't easy to come by. I didn't listen. I thought that since I had an account with HSBC, and since they're an international bank, they could just "snap" their fingers and open an account for me. Bob would then be my Uncle. It turns out that I do not in fact have an uncle Bob. HSBC have an international banking center in Australia, any such requests have to go through them and then they send us out the standard package which we fill out and return, processing then takes six weeks. Six Weeks! Fine I said to the lady on the phone, make it so. No she said. Why not? I ask. Any such request must be made at a branch. Ok, I said. But surely, we're just going to walk in there, make the request and he's going to pass the request to Australia, then they send the package. Couldn't you do it? Yes I could says she, but the request must be made from a branch. Two weeks ago, we went to the branch and requested that they send us out the package, they passed on the request (sigh, it happened exactly as I thought it would) and then told us that the package would arrive soonish. Two weeks drag by. Meanwhile our latest bank statement arrived on Monday (the last ingredient for our visa applications), so we get that together with our other stuff and send off our visa applications. Other stuff includes our passports. We sent this on Tuesday morning. Tuesday afternoon our pack from HSBC finally arrives. We only need to fill in the details and rock on down to a branch of HSBC with some ID and we're all set. The only ID they accept is your passport. Yes, that same passport which we sent off that morning. After a morning of ringing around it turns out that everyone agrees that the best form of ID we could use would be our passport and no, nothing else will do. No one is even willing to start the paperwork and then sight the passport once we get it back. The passport must be sighted first and THEN the paperwork will start. Which leads me to the trinity. I went online to find out if there is any other way to get a bank account in the UK and I found an interesting thing:
to get a bank account, you must have a job and a lease with your name and address. Even more interesting is that to get a job, you must have a bank account and a lease with your name and address. The final straw is that to get a lease, you must have a bank account and a job.
Since the trinity is denied to me by virtue of being rather impossible to get any 1 thing without already having another, I guess we'll be doing the six week thing AFTER our passports get back. Which means that depending on timing, we won't have a bank account for the first three or four weeks while we're over there. Well, I guess we'll just have to go on holiday for that time. :-)

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