Friday, August 19, 2005

Typical Bureaucratic Bullshit...

Yesterday was supposed to be a day file with excitement for My wife and I. You see Rachael is from England and yesterday was her greencard interview. She received the letter telling her when the appointment was 3 months ago. We had to be at the immigration building in Philadelphia at 1:00. It was both exciting and nerve wracking. It has been a long and emotion filled journey to get to this point and I was ready to get the greencard and move on. Rachael has been looking forward to this day for 6 long years. Up to now she was here on a work visa which has to be re-newed every 2 years.

Rachael's employer and friend Mr. Scott was kind enough to help us out with a lawyer. Rachael was very prepared, she had all her documents in a nice binder and everything seemed in order. We found the place no problem, we were a little early but it was better than being a little late.
They called us in for the interview and everything was going well. They asked her the questions; Are you a terrorist? Are you a Nazi?, Have you ever sold drugs?, you get the point. Then the guy conducting the interview starts playing with his computer, prints out some pages and leaves the room for a minute. When he comes back in he begins to tell us that a name check has not been performed yet. You see Rachael and I went to Baltimore last October for her to get finger printed and they were supposed to do the name check then. She had to go into Philadelphia last month and get finger printed again because the original ones had expired. This all seemed a bit odd to both of us, but it's the government. The guy then starts to tell us it's a back log thing and the info could come in today or a year from now. I could see the disappointment in Rachael's eyes. We were then told the green card will just show up in the mail one day. There will be no approval notice or anything just a green card. The worst part is we had no idea when. Needless to say Rachael was absolutely crushed. 6 years waiting for this day only to leave with out a greencard because some government official Fucked up and either lost the document or forgot to put it in her file. I tried to stay positive hoping things will work out sooner rather that later.

Rachael called the lawyer and left her a message, when she called back the lawyer was furious. She said that we should have never gone in for the interview if they didn't have all the info they needed. She also said the guy doing the interview knew this and was trying to cover his ass. Rachael's lawyer told us this will get to the supervisor and be resolved quickly and we should see the green card within a month. I only hope she is right. I guess this proves the system sucks.

Thanks for reading,
Buddy

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