The Ballad of the Visa

As it turns out, untimely approval of a visa application is not the most disastrous prospect upon sending your passport and supporting documentation off to the British Consulate. Having it be lost in the mail, in actuality, is the worst possible scenario. Imagine preparing a visa application over the course of a summer. The stars themselves must align to ensure your success. The biometrics must be dated within two weeks of the Consulate receiving the packet. The visa letter sent from your university needs to be dated at least a month old. The supporting documentation which you painstakingly completed online, printed, and sent should be less than ten days old. In total, your window for success becomes a smaller and smaller sliver of light. You then entrust your hopes upon the postal officer who delivers your precious envelope into the hands of the knowledgeable mail room supervisor at the British Consulate’s office in Chicago. Here your fate will be decided. That is, unless the envelope sits for an ungodly amount of time in the wrong pile within the office’s mail room. This seems unlikely. Oh, but wait…it happened.

About a week after mailing off our visa packets, containing our passports and every vital piece of information about each of us, Kevin received confirmation of his packet’s arrival and verification that he had, indeed, received a visa from the British government. I received nothing. Although seemingly strange we assumed all would be fine in due time. Once due time came and went, I embarked on a mission to talk to an actual human being at the Consulate’s office in Chicago. To this day I still have not actually achieved this goal, but after a few days I did locate an email address and enquired about the status of my visa application. I was told, in sober and straight forward language, that my packet was almost certainly lost in the mail. They kindly suggested that I start the entire process over. Oh, and I needed to get a new passport too.

Suddenly my window’s small sliver of light became non existent and was replaced with the bleak prospect of canceling my passport and taking a night train to Washington, D.C., (the closest place to Georgia where one can apply for a quickie passport), and returning to the cold, nondescript building in Atlanta for another round of biometrics. After 16 emails with the Chicago office (and 16 unanswered pleas to please speak to someone on the phone) I decided to cancel my passport, which was surely being used at that very moment as an alias of an international criminal. Making a noon deadline for myself, I hoped the post office returned my call with news of my found packet. At two minutes to noon I found a new message from the Consulate's Chicago office in my inbox, completely independent from the collection of customer service representatives with whom I had been in contact. The letter informs me that the Consulate received my packet and will be processing it over the course of 10-15 business days.

I am convinced the British government is messing with me. Refusing to believe the message, I email once again the people who had ensured me that my information was lost. After a day and a half they respond. Yes, indeed my packet had “resurfaced” and was being processed. I refuse to celebrate until about 12 business days later when the news arrives that my application has been approved, (this occurs just one day away from me leaving Georgia and just a week and a half before our scheduled flight.) Now if only the Consulate mailed my passport, with its newly imprinted visa, to the correct address. One more hurdle to jump for their entertainment, and I drive to my old house in the suburbs of Athens to collect my entrance ticket into Great Britain.