You haven’t heard from me in a long time and for me to fully explain would take countless numbers of talks. Basically, I’ve been in England for the past year and a half. I married a British lady and the attempt to get her the proper papers to allow her to travel back & forth has taken us a year and a half.
I will tell you only the funnier stories about her attempt to get what is called a Green Card because to tell you all the stories would take too long & would bore you to tears.
The whole process was delayed by six months because we sent the wrong form of payment. According to the authorities in London they would not accept personal checks, only bankers checks or credit cards. Bankers checks in American dollars are hard to get in England so we decided to pay by debit card. The actual place we had to apply to was in the U.S. At the end of three months of waiting we received a letter that informed us our application was rejected because they did not accept debit cards. So we tried again with a credit card because the application form we received from the American Embassy in London had a place to fill in your credit card number. A month later the American branch wrote back to say they only accept personal checks.
If, five months earlier they had just telephoned, or emailed, and said, please send us a personal check, we would have saved four months of waiting. After they finally accepted our personal check, it took them six months to approve our application. After that stage of the approval process it took them two months to send us a letter, a very funny letter.
The gist of the letter was that they decided not to send us the next batch of forms because letters take a long time to get to England. They asked us to please designate an agent in the U.S. to act for us. They would send him the forms which, presumably, he would then have to send to us in England.
How stupid, how idiotic, can you get? You have to send a letter to England to say that letters take a long time to get to England? No kidding -- and if you had sent me the forms, they would have been in my hands right now, instead of a letter that tells me that letters take a long time to get to England and that I have to send a response to, and that will take a long time to get back to America.
We were furious, and powerless. Those idiots. Thy wasted weeks telling us what we already new, and now we have to wait for my brother in law to get the forms which he will then have to send to England. In the final analysis he didn’t need to send us the forms because these were forms that were available on the internet -- you could just download them from the INS site on the internet -- and they could have just told us to download the forms.
As you can tell, this is an idiotic and endless process. After we finally got the forms – two months later – and mailed them to the embassy in London, we had to wait about ten weeks to get a date for what should be the final day-long interview. At the end of that day (I am writing this before the event) we should receive the proper papers to allow us to travel back & forth freely. In fact, unless we receive those papers, you will not be listening to this talk.
So I’m finally back, and talking to all of you, but we will only be here temporarily. We intend to live part of the time here and part of the time in England.
Copyright © 2004 Henry Morgenstein