The waiting game.

Estragon: Let's go.
Vladimir: We can't.
Estragon: Why not?
Vladimir: We're waiting for Godot.
Estragon: (despairingly). Ah!

-Waiting for Godot

 

Davis: Let's go.
Pottsy: We can't.
Davis: Why not?
Pottsy: We're waiting for the bloody Embassy..
Davis: (despairingly). Ah!

-Probably not Waiting for Godot

 

We wait. It’s what we do. And I tell you what: tick followed tock followed tick followed tock followed tick.

Any day now, a letter from the US embassy stipulating date and time of interview will drop through my letter box. It didn’t today. It didn’t last Monday either, although I had the strongest sense of preja vu that it would.  But it didn’t. So we go through the motions of working, and getting rid of stuff, and never being sure, and talking on MSN and having dates via webcam.

And it’s fine. But frustrating. There is a seemingly indefinite list of things to save up for. Visa, plane tickets, freight, medical examination (to prove I’m not carrying TB or HIV, or any of those other nasty acronyms), wedding rings, Christmas, and on and on and so on…

It’s making life take place somewhere between Melville, Beckett, Kafka and Bridget Jones, all of which came neatly together a couple of weeks ago. At 5:45am my alarm goes off, so I can chat to Stacey for an hour before work. Now usually, she does most of the talking and I confine myself to yeses, noes, LOLs, brbs and emoticons because, well, it’s still bloody night time.

But the morning in question, the old grey matter was somewhat shocked into what passes for alertness at a time of the morning when one could comfortably convince oneself that it’s still yesterday, when a litany of alarming MSN messages from the Dearly Beloved carried somewhat perturbatory news.

We’d fucked it up, royally. Oh boy. Wake up. Wake the fuck up. The paperwork is wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. You have not only dropped a bollock, but you have dropped an extremely rare 15th-Century lacquered Ming bollock with mother-of-pearl inlays, which was one of the only known remaining pair of lacquered Ming bollocks outside China. And it had just gone ka-ching on the floor.

In all the hurry-up-and-wait which is the visa application process, we had sent all the embassy forms off in August, but had failed to attach my personal documents. Police certificate, Birth certificate and so on. The reason we hadn’t heard was because we’d been put to the bottom of the pile, having forgotten to attach the documentation. We were sure we’d been right not to include this at the time. And now we were equally sure that this had been the equivalent to putting on boxing gloves before handling a precious, extremely rare 15th-Century lacquered Ming bollock with mother-of-pearl inlays.

It all boiled down to Form DS-156K (as distinct from for DS-156). I knew I hadn’t sent my documents. But looking at my copy of DS-156K it specifically stated that we had to attach them to it. We had held off sending them. We may or may not have enclosed the DS-156K without the personal papers. We weren’t sure. We weren’t even sure which-if either- of these courses of action had been correct. I had to phone the embassy and ask whether we’d been right to wait or not.

A very tense day followed, as I waited to get home from work so I could pay £1.20 a minute for the privilege of speaking to Shaq, a Scotsman with an Arabic name working for the American Embassy in London. He could tell me, at least  (for the princely total sum of nine pounds) that I was NOT supposed to attach the documents. So far, so good. But he could not say whether or not the DS-156K had been in the envelope with forms DS-156, DS-157, DS-230 and DS-2001. This was crucial. If we’d withheld it in order to send it with the birth certificate and so on, our application would be held up and our petition might expire, leaving me this side of the Atlantic for another 9-12 months and having to pay for another petition. Shaq gave me a code to put on an email to the consular office, so I could make a proper enquiry. I sent a newly filled-in DS-156K to the embassy by special delivery (£5 for one sheet of A4- thank you, Royal Mail)

Two days later, the reply appeared:

Thank you for your email correspondence.

According to our records, the Immigrant Visa Unit received all of the necessary forms in your case yesterday. You will be notified of your interview appointment date and time shortly.

Sincerely,

Consular Information Unit
U.S. Embassy, London

So, at the price of £14 total and three days of feeling as sick as a dog, the message from the US embassy is this: Everybody, be cool.

And so we wait.