It's Me, Sara Louise

Today. Oh, today.

I was going to blog about my trip to Toulon (the one I made after meeting Gregory in Paris) or a jubilant evening I had here in my little town with an old friend (keyword: shenanigans), but I woke up full of righteous indignation and thought, “you know what, I need to vent this merde out,” and since you guys are the best ventees going, that’s what I intend to do. And on the upside, you will get an update on Gregory’s Green Card situation.

OK. So you remember my aptly named post a couple of weeks ago, Frustration? Well this post basically continues on from that.

On the Thursday that I received the visa center’s devil letter, you know, the one that says “please wait 60 days for us to process this…” I basically blew a gasket. I had already received a 60 day letter before (60 business days before to be exact) and thought that there was no way in the universe that I should have to get another one because that’s 120 days of waiting, and that’s bupkes.

So I reached out to a good friend of mine who happens to work for a congressman here in Texas. Unfortunately for me, he’s not my congressman, he represents the district right next to mine. But good news, his office was very helpful, and after emails flying back and forth on the Friday, they got me in touch with a woman in my congressman’s office, and on Monday of last week, that woman acknowledged the email from the other office and told them that she would be in touch with me (I had also emailed my own congressman’s office on the Friday, and this lady did confirm that my email was in their system.)

Fast forward two days to the Wednesday and I still hadn’t heard anything back from the lady in my congressman’s office. At midday I called her and as she seemed clueless to who I was, I filled her in. Her response was basically, “oh yes, you,” YES ME! But despite her short term memory problems, she seemed helpful. She told me that she would send me a privacy release letter and I just needed to send that back signed along with a letter detailing the problem and my congressman would contact the visa center and get someone to pull the file and work on it.

This was great news! Sure I was annoyed that she hadn’t contacted me on the Monday and asked me to do these things (at this point, every, single, day counts), but hey, we were getting somewhere! Within the hour, I had the papers she had requested emailed back to her, and on Thursday she sent me an email confirming that my congressman had initiated the inquiry with the visa center and we would hear something within two to fourteen days.

I got excited. Things were going to move in two to fourteen days. Someone was going to look at our file, because that’s what the lady said would happen. Unfortunately, the lady is not very good at managing expectations.

Yesterday afternoon, there was an email from the lady in my inbox. My heart jumped, and then I read it, and my heart fell, it fell hard. She told me that they had gotten the same “60 day delay” response that I did and she was all like, “sorry we can’t do more, I’ll check back in 30 days, blah, blah, bupkes.“

Uh, H to the E L L, no.

I sent an email back asking what was the point of getting my congressman’s office involved for them to only get the same lame response that I did and that I wanted to know why I had to go back to the bottom of the pile because of one teeny, tiny, clarification to my documents. I don’t want to skip the line, I just want to be back in my old spot in the line. It’s like I had to step out of the line for a second, WHY COULDN’T SOMEONE SAVE MY SPOT?!

She called me. She explained that the visa center gets so much paperwork, that when it’s received, it goes to a warehouse and it can take up to THREE WEEKS for papers to get from the warehouse, to the office where it’s actually attached to a file. Could she not have said this to me last week?! It’s called managing expectations lady, look into it! You work for a congressman for Pete’s sake.

Anyway, she said that she would follow up in two weeks and I said, no, next week. She said, “I’ve been doing this for six years, I know that there is no way your papers will be attached to your file next week,” (if she’s been doing this job for six years then you’d think that she would have explained this ‘three weeks to get papers to the office’ malarkey before… once again, managing expectations). I told her that as of next week, it’s three weeks, so she needs to follow up next week, not in two, because as soon as my papers get attached to my file, I want them back in the line, not at the end of the line, but back in my spot, where they belong.

So there you have it. FRUSTRATED.

If anyone needs me, I’ll be banging my head against the wall.