Bah!
I have nothing to share with you except my bad, bad attitude.
If you come to visit me and you would like to complain about your job or the government or anything really (except maybe bunnies), I'd be happy to listen and validate by adding lots of comments like, "Yeah, I hate people too! People are the worst!" and "No, that IS a horrible, bureaucratic nightmare. You should bake yourself a pie. And share it with me. You deserve it."
Yesterday morning Steve and I were listening to the news while we lounged in bed. The last several days, all the news coverage has been about the riots and looting in London and I was explaining to Steve that the UK needs to embrace rubber bullets and that if I were in London, I would be happy to shoot some looters in the eye with a rubber bullet or two. This was before I developed my bad attitude and hatred for humanity.
We spent the day at Steve's office so I could proofread the first section of Steve's PhD and give him a scolding about the passive voice. When we returned home, a much-anticipated piece of mail awaited us. Tragically, it was not the identification record that we need but rather the THIRD letter explaining that the fingerprints we submitted (and which must be accepted before we can submit my immigration forms) had been rejected. The prints I traveled to London to obtain. On a night train, in a non-reclining seat, without a blanket, in a freezing cold carriage. While morning sick.
I called the agency and asked them what the deal was and they said that some people just have fingers that don't fingerprint well. I see. I asked what I should do about that. Here's what they said: submit some more prints. Ah, yes, so helpful. Because doing the same thing over and over again is bound to eventually get me a different result.
That's when the rage kicked in and I started suggesting to Steve that we go loot something.
7 comments:
They make it so much harder for the people who want to do it correctly than those who just barrier-jump. BAH.
Don't they have the electronic scanning things? Before I moved to the UK (grad student) I got my fingerprints scanned on an awesome machine - and they had to do one of 'em twice because the first time didn't work out so well... but they did it THERE - and right away they could tell there was a problem. Are they using this technology? If so, why didn't they rescan you at the time, and if they ARE doing the ink thing (which I have ALSO had done for when I worked for a library [county employee rules, I guess]) they ALSO checked them there and said good, right after. (I can't recall if we had to redo something... I have a feeling we did, but the memory isn't the clearest... it's been a long time.)
Anywho... I hope you get it works out for you soon!
Sorry that sucks!
You would go and make a big announcement during the one month that I forgot to blog or read blogs! Congrats.
What the .... There better be a refund here.
KWB
StowmarKate--I always think that too. If I had a terrible record that I wanted to hide, do they really think I would jump through all these hoops?
Anonymous--Yes, last year when I had digital prints done for the UK, they were done in the US and each finger was rescanned until it was correct. Here they're done with ink and they're checked but there's no way to check them with the machine used in the US, which is the one that has to read them. They're not BAD prints, but they're not readable by the US scanner. Very frustrating.
Courtney--Thanks!
KWB--I'm sure there will be (maybe), but we haven't gotten that far yet. We're still just trying to work out good prints.
You know what I find incredibly frustrating... Somewhere out there attached to a file with your visa is a digital copy of your fingerprints. Now, I know they want new fingerprints so that fraud can't be an issue, but really! there's a perfectly good copy of your fingerprints SOMEWHERE. That can be read by the machine, since they were TAKEN on the machine. sigh.
wooow…That would be frustration written in large letters of scary gothic font. That's incredible!
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