Publisher's Synopsis
I arrived in London on a gloomy winter day in 2014 with my wife, two agitated dogs, six suitcases, and seven hundred pounds cash. It was the first day of the rest of my life as an immigrant to England. My initiation to driving on the left side of the road was squeezing a van that was too large for English single carriageways through rush hour traffic from London to Leeds, where we took up residence in a basement hotel room resembling a castle's dungeon. That's right, I moved to Leeds of all places, which is a city you probably haven't heard of unless you're a fan of one of England's worst football teams.
The average American's inability to locate Leeds on a map, combined with daily events that caught me completely off-guard, taught me that Americans know much less about England than they imagine. Americans have many stereotypes about their partner in the special relationship, and these are almost all wrong. Brits are not a race of tweed jacket-wearing intellectuals with posh accents. Nor are they villains who drive fast cars and bleed tea. Well, most of them aren't. They are normal people with lives plagued by poor customer service, battles over limited sidewalk space, moldy homes, and the shame of not remembering who they kissed during their most recent Christmas party blackout. Manage your Expectations is a book about my experiences living and working among the English. It is about the struggles of being an immigrant in a new country, of discovering that England is more different from America than it seems, and of driving on the left side of the road. It is about learning how to be embarrassed when talking to strangers and eventually understanding British humor. It is a story with copious amounts of whingeing (complaining) about trivial inconveniences that no real Englishman would dare to put on paper. My goal is to give readers a glimpse into British life and to break through the misconceptions. The insights into British culture come through anecdotes ranging from job interviews and doctor visits to the time my family was trapped in our living room because of a faulty lock and had to tunnel out with a hammer. The stories capture the strange, funny, and frustrating aspects of life as a foreigner in England.
