✧✦Catherine✦✧why do i need to know this for settlement
who gives a fuck
Ryan Finnie@whitequark Is this, like, something every Brit knows as a piece of useless trivia? Like how San Francisco is 49 square miles and they made that into the geo-cultural identity of the city?
Space Hobo
Colin Watson@spacehobo @ryan @whitequark Most people born here probably know it's the longest distance on the mainland. I doubt many people know the numerical value, unless they've cycled/run/whatever it.
@cjwatson @ryan @whitequark Yes, and I'll admit I only know the distance in metric (from when I was obsessively plotting routes during lockdown) and had to convert to go "Oh it's at *least* that much..."
Graham Sutherland / Polynomial@ryan @whitequark absolutely not. I have lived here all my life, I'm 38, and I could not have answered any of these. the tests are such bullshit designed to reject as many people as possible through bizarre trivia.
@gsuberland @ryan don't forget about charging exorbitant per-attempt fees
@whitequark @ryan yeah the home office are absolute scumbags
@whitequark @gsuberland @ryan Wait until you get to the point where they deduct an £N,000 fee and also check your accounts to make sure you have £N,000 laying about — IN THAT ORDER.
@spacehobo @gsuberland @ryan HAHAHAHA wow
I've definitely... encountered... the tendency of the UK government to charge you exorbitant fees to do fuckin anything it's supposed to be doing, but I have thankfully avoided that specific issue
Ben Tasker@gsuberland @ryan @whitequark Same here - I didn't know a single one.
It's not even as though they're particularly interesting as a bit of trivia
@ben @ryan @whitequark I reckon they should just have a single question: "have you ever stepped on a plug?"
then they leave a freeform box, and if you reply with words to the effect of "yes and it fucking hurt, but british plugs are still the best" then you get citizenship
@gsuberland @ben @ryan if I wrote down how I feel about BS1363 plugs (though to me they're the HK plugs, not the UK plugs, because that's where I first had the misfortune of encountering them) they'd cancel my visa
@whitequark @gsuberland @ryan You might be able to avoid that cancellation by then going on to complain about the current state of the weather
anyMouse@whitequark @gsuberland @ben @ryan Multiparagraph rant over how British plugs are just the point of a really popular circlejerk and actually suck from both design and user perspective was the only comment I ever got gold for on Reddit (back when that was a thing).
PassengerThe naturalisation exam is deliberately filled with rote memorisation of absurd trivia as a way to catch people out and make it hard for them to pass. If you show it to Brits born there, almost none of them can do it.
@passenger @ryan I'm not even doing naturalization! I just want settlement
I want you to have settlement too. The Home Office wants to ensure that only people who can pass a weird fairytale riddle game can get it, for some reason.