Moving to BC (Bring Composure)
It’s been two weeks since I moved from the prairies for the bigger (than Calgary) city life of Vancouver; and other than missing my family and friends quite a bit still, I wish I’d tried a move like this, way before my 30th birthday (coming this Sept. 19 … dang!).
I realized today, I haven’t grown personally this much, this fast since I rented a bedroom in Jerad Diebolt’s northeast Calgary home after high school and experienced the “real world” first hand, for the first time (a.k.a: witnessing 9/11, losing 20 pounds due to malnutrition, and/or drinking booze ‘til my liver nearly popped).
Most of this recent growth has come from the series of emotional beatings my girlfriend, her parents, and I withstood mere hours after packing a U-Haul and hitting the hi-way for Vancity (bad luck doesn’t start to explain it).
But, another part of this new growth has come from learning the “BC way of life” and understanding that things I would normally complain about in Alberta don’t mean shite out here, so why bother? (Unless it’s for the purpose of this blog, after that I’m done.)
I won’t get into the incredibly depressing details of our move (I will say I’ve never been that sleep-deprived or thought I’d ever have to catch a few winks in a Wal-Mart parking lot … I hate you, hotel-less Kelowna, Merritt, and Vernon).
And I have officially stopped complaining about our merciless first few days of apartment life in Kitsilano (mostly, dealing with our lazy slumlord of a super, who tested every fiber of our rationality).
But, I will say I’ve learned quickly British Columbians do indeed do things at their own pace, or live by the BC way … and sometimes “the way” involves we the customer, drinking a molasses-based cocktail of equal parts incompetence and passivity.
Example #1 (and admittedly, the worst one I can bring up)
From the first day we got here (July 31) until late last week, I was on a de-morale-izing pain train with a cast of confusing characters — ICBC (Insurance Corp. of British Columbia), several auto shops, and multiple car insurance providers — for a few hours a day, getting a lesson in BC’s C.B. (Crazy Bureaucracy) while trying to insure my car in this great province.
Too much shiitake to shovel into one rant, but the biggest heap was the public insurance agency (ICBC) telling me I must pay the HST on the book value of my car (a 2000 Neon, given to me by my mother, which the ICBC declared was worth three grand … really? Sold!) before they’d give me anything. I was ready to take a putrid bath and pay the $342.60 in Sheriff Nottingham-esque taxes, but I had a Bruce Lee Striking Thought, a few seconds before whipping out my debit card. The HST (12 per cent) is a representation of the federal Goods and Services Tax (five percent) and an unnamed, arbitrary “rate” (seven per cent) combined — so, why would anyone have to pay the GST twice on the same car? (My mom bought the car brand new and paid $1500 in GST, at the time of purchase.)
After bringing this to his attention and having him call his overlord at the head office, the insurance representative (who I will admit was a pleasant Asian fellow) told me I’d just have to pay the PST now, because “they want to see you’ve paid some provincial sales tax in BC on the car” — even if that tax doesn’t exist anymore in British Columbia? (“As of July 1, 2010, there is no PST, HRT or GST in British Columbia – only the HST”).
When he couldn’t form a coherent response to my new query (why would I pay a tax you don’t have anymore?) and because moments earlier he was confidently attempting to charge me a fee he had no business asking me for, I got my bucks out of there and tried a fresh insurance place, down the street from my place.
Long story, but all the faith I’d lost in logic during this whole debacle was (pretty much) restored and I came to know that part of living by the BC way involves doing other peoples’ jobs for them, from time to time.
The new place charged me nothing in back taxes (no HST, GST, PST, or “ST” of any kind), and told me flatly: people in the insurance industry in BC are sometimes hacks (a bit unfair, I thought, as there are hacks in every industry, everywhere), or they offered another explanation, which I prefer — ICBC workers are sometimes overwhelmed by the ever-changing standards their government-regulated industry demands they become fluent in, and depending on who you talk to (and at what level) can determine what you pay.
I still don’t know if I pulled an awesome scam and duped the provincial government out of a bunch of B.S. tax money, or if the first few people I dealt with (including a “higher-up” representative from the ICBC) didn’t know what they were talking about. But, this experience, smashed together with a few others — seeing my girlfriend get a marathon runaround from her university’s admissions department, waiting for a new fridge to get delivered (five days late and counting), waiting for (probably) fictitious painters (they never did show — our landlord ended up painting our place himself, only after we called him on it), watching people cross the street at a sloth’s pace (serious, it’s something you notice right away out here, and it’s consistent), and having to drive halfway across the city to find a jug of water for our cooler - a jug that can be easily be found at every Mac’s and Safeway in Alberta — has baptized me in the BC way, and as a result of this conversion I have become aware and appreciative of the actual important things in life: finding inspiring lotus-filled ponds, taking the dog for long walks by the beach, trying out new foods with my girlfriend, and a whole mess of generalized summer relaxing.
British Columbians are more laid back than Albertans, and I know why — you have to be to cope with the institutionalized malaise you run into out here. And I’m not mad about this, I’m thankful for it, it has helped me focus on the things I should care about.
