HOLY COW BATMAN!
When I was a kid I used to watch Batman on tv. The one with Adam West as Batman and God knows who as Robin. Whenever there was an action scene (read: fight) involving the Joker, Riddler, or Penguin, the screen would flash with bold letters “SOK! BAM! KAPOW! BLAP!” Other times, something surprising would happen and Robin would exclaim, “HOLY COW BATMAN!” Only later did I realize that was a euphemism for an expletive. Given that we generally try to keep this a family friendly blog, let me just say that Ann and I had a, “HOLY COW BATMAN!” moment the past week. Join us to find out what it was.
We’ve been back from Portugal for a week now and while we still have a post to do from the trip (it needs some photo processing work to get done) something came up this week during our trip to San Francisco to file our residency visa applications that warrants an immediate posting.
Much of last weekend was spent compiling documents for our Wednesday 10:00 am appointment with VFS Global Services - the company that intakes the visa application materials and makes sure that everything that is supposed to be there is there. They are not the decision maker, as several signs in their offices clearly indicate.
Anyway, our trip down there was problem free. The flight was fine, getting from the airport to the hotel via BART was fine, the hotel was . . . ok, the rock hard beds were not fine . . . we found a good place to have dinner as well as breakfast the next day and were up and ready for our appointment as scheduled. The appointment letter said to not show up more than 15 minutes before our appointment time, so early birds Ann and Dan walked around for awhile (ok, Ann’s watch said it was 5 miles of walking), and we entered the waiting room 13 minutes before our appointment time.
The in-processing went pretty smoothly. We were well prepared, though didn’t have a copy of our marriage certificate (the forms said that’s only necessary if it’s a family reunification visa - which ours are not), but we had no issue downloading a copy of it from our dropbox account. All said and done, we were out of there by about 11:00.
In our wanderings, we realized that we weren’t far from the Leica shop, so we stopped by there on the way back to the hotel and enjoyed some lovely photographs and got a couple of books. Picked up our bags from the hotel, hit BART and back to the airport for our flight home.
Walking through the airport I pulled out my phone to see if I’d gotten any messages. HOLY COW BATMAN! Look what came in while we were on the subway!
Ann said, “You’ve got to be kidding. It couldn’t have been approved that fast could it?” I checked Google Maps - the Portuguese Consulate (the visa decision makers) are only a couple dozen blocks away. Our applications were pretty thorough, and even had things like the personal statement written in Portuguese (thanks to Ei!). It really shouldn’t take anyone more than 10 minutes or so to go through it and approve it. I guess it could be. Ann said, “What about that famous Portuguese bureaucracy we hear so much about?”
You see, the visa website says it takes at least 15 days, usually 30 - 45 days, to get a visa. Last year, when there was a flood of applications and they were transitioning to the VFS system, they were running closer to 90 days in some instances. Also, we were hoping it would be more on the longer end because we’ve got a lot, I mean a lot, to do in the meantime. Losing 3-6 weeks of time was not part of the game plan. A few minutes later Ann says, “I just got one too.” Ugh.
Let’s just say that over the next few hours one of us would periodically say something like, “Can you believe that?” “Man are we going to be crunched on time.” “Who would have thought it?”
The flight home went off event free, but this was waiting in my inbox when we arrived.
Wait a second, that says they’ve sent our materials to the embassy, after UPS says they’re sending us our visas. By that point, we were both very confused. Still, we were potentially adjusting our activities for Thursday to make sure someone was home at all times.
Then, Thursday morning as Ann and I were having coffee, this landed in my mailbox
As best I can figure, UPS notified us when VFS assigned a tracking number to our visa application (the embassy will return our passports with the visa in it via overnight delivery), and inadvertently informed us that it would be “delivered.” Realizing that they were not picking up that package yet, they sent us an “Oops!” e-mail. Despite all the worrying on our part, it was better that than the alternative.
Whew! Dodged a bullet with that one.