Back Online
I feel like I’ve been maintaining radio silence for the last week. Things have been hectic but ended quite successfully yesterday. Today is kind of a ghost-day, as my to-do list only has three items: one is “find out how something works”, another is “look at European market statistics”, and the final is “get data from someone and send to someone else”. My calendar (Euro-English: “diary”) is empty.
I have decided to go ahead and break ranks and put my punctuation outside the quotation marks when not typesetting dialogue or the like. My leadership class tells me the most sophisticated way to influence people is to model the good behavior, so away we go.
It turns out I am now fully legal to work in Turkey. My Turkish really breaks down in highly technical or legalistic situations, so my best guess is that I am waiting on some social security stuff to get worked out here locally, then I should be migrated to local payroll, given my meal card at last (paid lunches is a statutory workers’ rights thing here), and in general start being compensated (in a wholistic sense) consistently with what my offer says.
I have to commend Shell for being fair during this process. Some things I would say we made hard on ourselves due to personal convictions: I was unwilling to ride my expense account as long as I was probably justified to do so, and I definitely didn’t want to get into the probably quite typical expat excesses of purchasing/renting extraneous sets of furniture and the like to avoid awkward transition time. The HR guidelines manage to make things relatively equitable for people in my situation, as well as those who are travelling so much they are nearly an expat by default.
But in the end, what is coming is more convenience than a massive justice thing.
I went through the somewhat elaborate solo adventure of getting a checking account set up here. I finally decided on Garanti as my bank, which is very expat-friendly. Most of the contractual stuff was in English and Turkish, so I know what I signed!
Garanti is the bank here that was running commercials with an Obama impersonator pumping their “low” (> 12%) interest rates for car loans and such. Banks here have been highly profitable throughout the crisis.
They have a nice presence and good locations (one kind of close to work, one kind of close to home). Yapi Kredi, my other choice, may have been more convenient, but they were probably going to be less friendly to my concerns as a foreigner. But, they do have a satellite branch on the ground floor of my building, so I walked away from a lot of convenience there.
There really isn’t a whole lot else to report. About 1,000 petrol dealers marched on Ankara two days ago demanding release of the price cap, and we are doing what we can to re-establish a viable business model for our shareholders despite the capricious interference with a highly competitive, fair business.