Two steps closer to Philly

This week started low, remained low, and then peaked towards the end of the week, at least in terms of my impending Philly adventure. I’d been expecting some documents to arrive last Friday, and that day came and went without any word or delivery, so I sent an e-mail off to one of my supervisors, but didn’t get a reply until Tuesday (because Martin Luther King Jr. had the audacity to be the reason for everyone in America to have a day off on Monday), when I found out they were only posting the documents on Tuesday, which was pretty depressing, because it put me a week behind schedule. I obsessively tracked the package online - which is both a brilliant and terrible idea, because you know where your package is, and you know it’s close, but you can’t do anything to make it get to its destination faster - and despite being forwarded for delivery from Manchester for delivery at 12:24pm on Thursday it didn’t make it into my hands until this morning.

I read through everything and then rang up the Embassy to book my interview, which costs £1.20 a minute by the way, and they spend 30 seconds at the start of each phone call telling you how expensive it is, and after going over a few details with the lady on the end of the phone it turned out that their system was down. Oh. Moving on then.

Another thing I needed to do was pay a SEVIS fee to the Department of Homeland Security (I know!) to have me put on their system, so I went through all that, putting in my details and the numbers I’d got off the new documents, and got all the way through to the payment processing screen… which could take up to 2 minutes.

…………

20 minutes later I became concerned.

I went through the ‘check status’ section and I wasn’t on the system, checked my bank and nothing had been charged to my credit card, and just figured that it hadn’t gone through. I rang up the DHS, who are actually a lot more friendly than you’d imagine, and the reason why it hadn’t gone through was because, predictably, their system was down. How come whenever you ring somewhere to book *anything*, their system is down? I mean really, what’s the deal with that?

Anyway, I waited a few hours, rang the DHS again to check that they were working again, which they were, so I paid up, rang up the embassy again (but pressed 1 before the robot lady explained how expensive the phone call would be so that I’d go straight through to the actual customer service person), and booked myself in for an interview on Tuesday.

One thing which really worried me was that she said they take my fingerprints (!), and so if I cut or blister my fingertips in any way I’ll have to reschedule the interview, which means I won’t be able to get there in time. It seems kinda crazy that the entire trip now hangs on me not cutting my fingers in any way, but it certainly is a good excuse to not have to do ANYTHING that involves cooking or work.