That sounds like something from Mr. Bean, actually, so it might go over very well with the other drivers in line. Extra comedy if your car starts to putter along while you’re outside of it, or if you stick your foot out the sunroof while leaning over to the other side.
You need to scream “Chinese Fire Drill” as you do it and run around the front on the way out and around the back on the way back in, while blaring Benny Hill music with the windows down.
That would have had me running through… uh… 12 cars in the last 8 years. Doesn’t sound very economical.
You may find this site useful http://www.talk.uk-yankee.com/
You move too much. 
It’s not a done deal by any means, it’s simply the top 3 picks of our ‘dream sheet’. We’ll find out some time in January at the earliest. Aggravating as all get out as we want to sell our two houses before moving (hopefully only 1 will be at a loss), but there it is. While we’ll do everything in our power to get our sponsor’s help we’ve been SOL for 2 assignments so far; first station our sponsor was deployed (Tripler even ran into him on his way out of Afghanistan to the new station as the guy was on his way **in **to BAF.)
The sponsor here had only been in Utah for 5 months and was ‘too busy’ to help, so we muddled through very well w/o him. He’s not in the Air Force anymore (unrelated).
If we get sent to England I’m not letting up till I make verbal contact w/ a human. I can move thousands of miles across one country alright but this is outside my bailiwick. We’ll live on base as well so I’ll sniff out the Exchange toot de suite.
Thanks, doll - I don’t know a lot but I know a synonym and a homonym.
Doll? Okay, that made me chuckle.
That’s the full extent of my Humphrey Bogart impersonation.
I think Bogart referred only to women as “dolls”.
Despite what a couple people have said, coupons are NOT widely used here. Though there may be one or two in the odd magazine, there are no big supplements with the papers, and it’s simply not a coupon culture. As pointed out, some stores have loyalty cards, which may result in a few coupons (often called “vouchers” here) being sent to you. It is absolutely acceptable to use these, and the cards, though you’ll find disappointingly few opportunities in which to do so.
Yes, they are.
No idea
Not the way they are in America. You don’t get a flyer in the newspaper with dozens of coupons to clip and take to the supermarket with you. Most supermarkets have a loyalty card that you present when paying and you get points added to your account, in some cases these are converted into vouchers, but you can only use them in the supermarket you got them from.
You certainly can’t “Extreme Coupon” in the UK
I think so, I don’t know anyone in England who drives one, but they are available
Probably
Really? I would assume that they just weren’t very busy, and if I was lucky that might continue long enough that they’ll ask me if I want the same again when they collect the empties from the table. It’s a fairly common phenomenon outside crush hour.
Having them give you grief for not showing your face last week and decrying your choice of ale as being 'orrible, on the other hand, just shows that you are a regular. Most amusing when you are taking a few of your colleagues on their first visit
As an example re: coupons, I shop at Sainsburys.
I have a loyalty card (Nectar) that I swipe before paying, and I get points based on the value of my shop. I can redeem those points as cash at the till, or I can redeem them for products from a number of stores. I tend to use them as cash to pay for my Christmas food shop at the end of the year.
After paying, I recieve a number of coupons valid for the next couple of weeks. Sainsbury’s also do a price comparison and if you could have bought items for cheaper at a competitors supermarket, they add up those savings and give you a coupon for that £ amount to redeem at your next shop.
In my experience, the coupons I recieve tend to be related to the sorts of products I buy, so they are using my Nectar account as a database to tempt me to buy stuff I haven’t bought in a while, or to buy a bigger amount of stuff that I normally buy.
The poking around I did on my own showed me UK coupons sites likethis one. The biggest difference I see is the lack of grocery coupons (Buy 3 cans of Campbell’s soup, save .40, etc); those are the usual printable ones here in the States and the kind you’ll see used on ‘Extreme Couponers’. While my coupon-planning methods are similar I do not clear out an item if I don’t need to and I always find an employee to say it’s all gone. I’ll still be able to shop that way at the Commissary or Exchange on base w/ the coupons Mom will mail to me, and up to 6 months after they expire.
The Nectar card is a new idea to me; here it’s a card per store and you can go to the store’s website to load electronic coupons to use until a certain date but only in their store; often they have promotions where you play a game and win a free item as well. There are 7 grocery store chains I can think of w/o looking it up here in Utah and about a quarter have a store-specific loyalty card. Some of the benefits are very helpful - one store gives you $2/gallon off when you buy gas at their stations (at the side of the store’s parking lot) after you’ve accumulated a certain amount of points. Last week we paid only 1.79/gallon for 30+ gallons of gas.
However, if I was able to put all the cards in one place it would be exponentially easier than having all these tags on my key-chain, fishing out the right one and keeping track of what coupons are loaded for which store.
Someone mentioned getting all our electronics before we move there; the RAF bases have online yard sales and it’s usual to sell your UK-only items when you move. I’ve perused them for a few weeks now and we’ll be fine if we wait till we get there. The Air Force will lend us a great deal for the first few months which should give us plenty of time to look around. When I see all the things we don’t use here collecting dust I have to wonder what we’ll really need there.
You’ve all been really fantastic and I appreciate all the insights you’ve shared. England will be a great change of pace and scenery at a time we could use it to keep us going.
Remember not to bring mace/pepper spray into the country, it’s an offence to possess here and falls under the firearms regulations. I only mention it because I had a friend at college get in trouble for that (got away with confiscation and a warning, but that was before more stringent rules came into force regarding firearms offences).
So when someone looks at me, I look fuzzy?
Kind of palsied, really.
Sainsbury, and also Tesco, very often have a petrol station on the same site, which is usually budget-priced * in the first place, and there may well be in-store offers that will earn you a per-litre saving; Tesco have been known to advertise multiple offers at the same time with stackable benefits.
If you’re going to be resident for long enough, Tesco for one (possibly Sainsbury, but we’re signed up with Tesco) have a voucher scheme linked to the bonus points on your Clubcard, and a number of deals where you can buy things with their money-off vouchers at three or four times face value.
We have, for instance, about £100 worth of “generic money off” vouchers, which you can use on the multiple-value deals as just mentioned; a number of discount vouchers on certain named products (e.g. 50p off when you spend £2.00 or more on Tesco popcorn; 40p off when you spend £1.50 or more on loose grapes); and vouchers to earn still more Clubcard points. They also run their own credit card scheme in which transactions earn more points towards vouchers as above.
*Budget-priced by UK standards. Petrol will seem horrendously expensive to you off-base and no store offer is going to do more than cushion the shock.
So leave your Stetson at home.
Definitely true for escalators, at least in places where people are likely to be in a hurry. That means stations, especially on the London Underground. I doubt you’ll be using that much, though.
Chances are you won’t get many, if any, complaints if you do this wrong. Only middle-aged women seem to bother telling people off for being naughty, and even they seem to resist it as much as possible.
I expect it’s what you meant anyway, but I’m going to point out that it’s actually the chargers/transformers that can take different voltages.
My laptop charger comes in two parts: a cable with a plug that supplies mains power and a transformer which that cable connects to. When I went to Canada I just had to switch the cable (since my UK plug won’t work in Canada) but used the laptop and the rest of the charger as normal. The cable itself uses a standard coupler so that was no problem.
Most phones these days use the same micro USB plugs to charge, so that should be no problem.
A lot of those electronics may be cheaper in the US, but it’s worth considering if the potential inconvenience of a foreign device is worth the saving. From what I understand, you can get such things even cheaper on military bases anyway.
One more thing I should point out on the subject is that most cables, adaptors and probably chargers and transformers are much, much cheaper to buy online here. Expect to pay 4 -10x as much in a high street store as you would after 5 minutes of searching Amazon. You can always browse some UK-based websites (such as amazon.co.uk) when trying to get an idea of the prices.
This is true. For example, I get a lot of coupons for Quorn, but never meat, since their system has clearly got me pegged as a namby-pamby vegetarian.
Regarding coupons/vouchers, may I recommend hotukdeals.com? It often lists good offers in supermarkets and has lots of vouchers (mostly for online use) but I find it most useful whenever I’m looking for something you don’t buy often, like electronics. I got a £750 laptop for around £440 by combining a deal, a voucher and a cashback site, all found there.
You know, the fact we’re always ordering Guinness probably has something to do with being told our drinks will be brought to us! Should have mentioned that.
And yes, when I said I didn’t see coupons being used any more or less than anywhere I’d been, I forgot about the extreme couponing that seems to exist in parts of the US. So, coupons for buy one get one free tub of yoghurt? Yes. Filling up a shopping cart with 24 sticks of deodorant? No.