Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, "That's not how I did it", boy that is a term I have heard mostly if I am having a beer standing in a bar somewhere and somebody unfortunately wants to talk shop with me which I kind of prefer you didn't. But yeah "That is not how I did it!" I have heard that so many times, if I had a nickel for every time I heard it I would probably be a millionaire. 

The reason I started thinking of this was I was reading the recent article from the tiger that's the Thaiger, thethaiger.com, hat's off to you folks over there. I do some videos from time to time with those folks and we do love their content but I thought of this from reading an article called: Top 10 hard truths of living as an Expat in Thailand, and number seven, the headline is:

7. But that's not how I did it last time. Quoting directly: "Immigration rules, negotiating with Police, business rules, road rule enforcement. The way you tackle some of these day-to-day little "impediments" should be treated as a single adventure and not be referred to in the future as the way things are done. Whilst Thailand has well described rules, regulations and laws relating to just about everything, they are often applied and enforced in a way that may appear unfair and inconsistent or not at all." Yeah look this is something we have tried to really, I have really tried to put across especially to Common Law thinkers so folks from the Anglosphere, the United States, the Commonwealth, UK, the Westminster System of Law that later evolved in the US to what we call the General Common Law System. It just isn't the same legal system here and I can't stress enough how deep those notions go in sort of the collective paradigm. For example they don't use precedent in the Court system here so prior Court decisions, especially at the trial level, they may have no bearing whatsoever on a later case, whereas that could be a very different situation, in fact, it will be a very different situation in the American legal tradition or the English legal tradition or the Australian or the Kiwi legal tradition, whatever. That is just a different way of doing things. 

These cases you are dealing with, visas whatever it is, it's going to be circumstantially dependent in many cases. If processing for example of your Business Visa extension worked one way last year, it is probably going to work similarly the forthcoming year but there is always some little change. We deal with it daily. In fact it is what we do especially in the Business Visa unit, dealing with these little documentation changes that just come up from time to time associated with just dealing with your ongoing status here in Thailand. 

So the thing to take away from this video is, look, that may not be how you did it but that doesn't mean it can't be done that way.