That's Some Catch, That Catch-22

During the movie "Blood Diamond," Leonardo DiCaprio explains that after a certain amount of time, you learn to accept certain aspects of living in Africa.  "T.I.A., bru" he says, in his somewhat dubious South African drawl.  "This Is Africa."  So it is with China.  There are just those times when the only possible explanation is to shake your head and say, with all due exasperation, "This is China."  Yesterday was one of those days.

It starts with some good news: I managed to finagle my way onto the envoy heading down to Guangzhou next week for a Client Seminar that we host every year.  What I'll be doing down there remains somewhat of a mystery, but it will certainly be more productive (at least for me, if not my company) than it would be to spend those two days  in the office.  So I get a free trip to one of the major cities in China to which I've never been.

Maybe I was spoiled by the two years I spent as a paralegal at a big law firm, but this is how I have come to expect business travel to work: either A) the employer makes travel arrangements on behalf of the employees, or B) employees book travel individually, and then submit receipts to be reimbursed in a timely fashion.  I've only had to submit an expense report at my current job once -- and it took two months to be paid -- so I was really hoping yesterday that we'd operate under Procedure A.  No dice.  "Just go ahead and book your flights, Josh, and submit the receipt for reimbursement," I was told.  Okay, not the end of the world, just standard Procedure B, right?

Remember, we're in China here.  The standard operating procedure is a sort of Murphy's Law 2.0 -- anything that can be made complicated, should be.  First, the ticket booking process: you wouldn't think it was possible for international flights to be simpler to purchase than domestic ones.  And yet, in China, it is.  See, if you're flying internationally, you can almost always pay with an international credit card.  But with domestic flights, the airlines are somehow incapable of processing foreign cards, unless you jump through several hoops (all of which are very small and hard to find).  After several failed attempts to book through Chinese travel sites, airline websites, and even one direct phone call to an airline booking office (which took the better part of yesterday morning), I finally managed to book my tickets through good old Orbitz.com.  To quote Basil Fawlty: "piece of cake.  Now comes the tricky bit."

Upon receiving my receipt and itinerary from Orbitz, I forwarded them to the appropriate human resources folks, along with the "official" expense claim documentation, as I was told to do.  An hour or so later, I received an email requesting that I forward the original hard copy of the invoice to the processing agency (which, naturally, is elsewhere in Shanghai, so had to be sent via express mail).  "But, see, this is an e-ticket," I tried to explain.  "There is no 'original' hard copy."  So I simply printed out the paperwork I got from Orbitz, and sent that along.  T&E done.

Not so fast.  Several emails, phone calls, and frustrated conversations later (making a very long story slightly less long), I still haven't found the proverbial cheese at the end of this byzantine reimbursement labyrinth.  Here's the basic problem: in order to satisfy tax requirements with the Chinese government (you didn't think we'd get through a "this is China" story without the government being involved, did you?), government endorsed invoices (发票, fapiao) are required.  These fapiao can only be issued by Chinese entities, so even though I'm flying on a China Southern, a Chinese airline, the original transaction came from Orbitz.  So no fapiao.  And since I don't have a Chinese credit card, it was nearly impossible for me to make the reservation with a Chinese, fapiao-issuing source.  What we have here, ladies and gentlemen, is a Catch-22:

It may take several lifetimes, but I'm still reasonably confident that I will eventually get back the 450 bucks I spent on those tickets to Guangzhou.  I have enough faith in my ability to yell at people.  But seriously...wouldn't it have been simpler to just buy the damn tickets on my behalf?  There are 25 million people in this city, many of whom have Chinese credit cards, several dozen of whom work in my office, and at least 5 of whom were aware of the issues at stake and still had me go buy my own plane tickets.  I guess sometimes you just gotta throw up your hands and say "this is China."

In other news, they've moved my desk in the office twice in the last three weeks.  Add that to the fact that I currently can't find my stapler....