Hussein Kanji: Surprises in London

Orientation was a blur.

It has only been a little over a month that I boarded a flight from Seattle and arrived in the United Kingdom. From the minute I landed, it's been busy. Unexpectedly busy. Orientation, pre-term classes, dealing with the logistics of life in the U.K. -- it's safe to say that I never expected things to get quite this hectic quite this fast. Everyone warns me it's only going to get worse.

It is also safe to say that I dramatically underestimated the time needed to adjust to life in old England.

Unlike most of my classmates, I chose to jump on a plane the day before everything was scheduled to begin, figuring everything I needed (housing, getting a cell phone, bank account, etc.) could be sorted out over the course of a week or two. I landed on Sunday and London Business School's orientation began the following day, on Monday. I was under the belief that things in Britain would be well, very similar to things in America. After all, America and Britain are merely cousins separated by a little bit of history and a small body of water. Talk about your faulty assumption.

It's a bad sign when you notice that banks have posters threatening criminal prosecution if you verbally abuse their staff. As an American, you might expect posters like this in the post office, but the bank? That's a head-shaking first. Think about it. It means that enough people in the past have lost it at bank tellers — across all branches — for the bank to warrant investing in advertising to dissuade future verbal abusers. What happens at a bank? Sure, there may be an occasionally long line, but what more in the way of uncaringly bad customer service would you expect at your local bank branch? Given that Britain is a society of polite, demure individuals, I didn't quite get it.

That was, until I tried to open up my bank account. Retail banking in the United Kingdom is abysmal. It took me the better part of three and a half weeks to establish my bank account. I'm still waiting for my checkbook. This is with repeated trips to the local branch, which closes promptly at 5 p.m. This was despite the bank's relationship with the school, and my attempt to deposit nearly £5,000 off the bat. The first few weeks of school, conversation was easy. We could simply trade our HSBC stories. One student had to show up for an "interview," scheduled two weeks prior. When he got to the branch, they couldn't find his appointment. He waited patiently for an hour until he finally lost it and raised his voice. The bank manager finally dragged out a second black-bound hardback, where his name was penciled in for the 2 p.m. slot. They use books to keep track of accounts. How primitive is that?

If someone — anyone — wants to start up an easy business in the U.K., set up a better bank. Britain will thank you. I don't know what regulatory hurdles you may face, but there's a list of "innovations" you could bring to retail banking. For instance, offer ATMs that let you deposit checks and money outside of bank hours. Banks here have automated machines that do this, just like in the U.S., but they keep them inside the branch -- which close at or before 5 p.m., meaning if you want to deposit a check after-hours, you're out of luck. Apparently, Canary Wharf, the newly established financial sector of London, has banks that offer full-functioning ATMs outside the branch.

I take some comfort in knowing that the banking system is bad across the board. One friend, who is easily worth several million, moved to the U.K. and faced the same challenges all of us did at the school.

Gwyneth Paltrow recently got into some trouble after unleashing a string of pet hates about life in London in Marie Claire magazine. "Customer service is just rubbish in England. People are much more relaxed there, and things take forever to get done. They'll tell you it'll take two weeks for your Internet service to be fixed! It drives me nuts." I never thought I'd be quoting Gwyneth, but she's spot on. All of us at the school have a long supply of anecdotes about the perils of British customer service.

No bank account means no apartment. It also means no cell phone. I knew I wouldn't have any credit history in the United Kingdom, but I thought I might be able to use my U.S. credit cards to at least secure a mobile phone. Wrong. Without a bank account, I ultimately had to rely on my uncle to pick up a phone under his name. I don't know how other students did it. I still don't have a place to live and am crashing with my cousin in Harrow, but I'm hoping to find something nearer to school soon. London is wonderfully residential town, when contrasted with New York, but that means homes here are geared for families. Studios and one-bedroom apartments are expensive and hard to find, while three- and five-bedroom apartments are comparatively inexpensive. This was great for the students who arrived early and got together in beautiful four- and five-bedroom flats, but bad news for all of us still hunting for a place to live.

There is a moral to all of this. Start early and give yourself plenty of time.

That has never been one of my strengths. Back in high school, when I was applying for colleges, I remember frantically finishing my Stanford application the day it was due -- at 11:15 p.m. Back in those days you actually had to post the application. Fortunately, living in New York City, something is always open 24 hours, including the post office. I remember jumping on the subway, heading to the main post office downtown, only to notice that the clock was 10 minutes after midnight. Bleary-eyed, I begged and pleaded with the night clerk to roll back the stamp and affix the proper postmark. I went through all of this trouble for my first-choice school. (Stanford had the earliest deadline, December 15.) I swore to myself I'd never do that again.

Enter business school. I don't think I started a single business-school application more than two days before it was due. Now to be fair, I spent quite a bit of time pondering over what would go into my essays. Even though I didn't turn in the applications until the last minute, I did prepare a nice "kit" for each of my recommenders in early August. For busy executives, that is a must-have as it gives them a nice frame for what to put into your essays. My recommenders were Dr. Kai-Fu Lee, who recently gained a bit of publicity when he left Microsoft (MSFT) for Google (GOOG); my former general manager at Microsoft; and the CEO of a startup I worked with prior to joining Microsoft. Each one had his recommendations done by middle of October. That left it up to me to finish the Harvard, Stanford, London Business School, and Oxford essays. Those were the only four schools I applied to. Each application was turned in right on deadline.

London has the shortest word counts of any application, and it takes some effort to get a pithy essay written. I'd counsel anyone applying to the program to spend some effort framing what they want to write, and making sure it carries the weight it needs to in the condensed amount of space the application gives you.

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