I feel like a part of growing is learning how to deal with
government and administration offices. These places are a necessary evil of
life, and I do mean evil.
This past year I have spent countless hours on the phone
with different offices at school, making sure paperwork gets submitted and not
lost under some desk, or checking to make sure all the proper information is
available or whatever. Its so frickin' frustrating because it feels like I have
to constantly make sure people do their own job. Like, just frickin' do your
job! You shouldn’t need a phone call to ensure that! No one calls the guy at
McDonald's to tell him to flip the burger, so why do you- an administrator at a
university- need help to make sure you don’t lose my paperwork in your mess of
an office? Ridiculous.
Since we’re working on moving to another country Kris and I
have now started to deal with all sorts of government offices as well. Our
experiences so far have mostly been described as SLOW. Excruciatingly so. Now
we’re working on getting our visas and the Japanese consulate in SF told us
that they simply could not get Kris a dependent visa until I was living in Japan . I told
them that I know for a fact we could do this before I leave and, after refusing
many times, they finally told us it was actually possible. What makes this so
infuriating is that they state in very simple terms how to get this visa on
their website! So we need to provide a bunch of extra paperwork on top of the
list mentioned on the website just so they can do their job…
Occasionally things go smoothly, but never swiftly. I
suppose this is good practice for the future, but still, its incredibly
frustrating. On top of all this we’re currently getting ready for a gigantic
garage sale to get rid of nearly all our belongings. Then after that we have a
long vacation in Disneyland . Then after that
its only 2 more weeks of works. THEN its only a couple weeks until we leave for
Japan .
If everything goes right, that is. We’ll see.
K+K