Skip to main content

Papers 2018, Part 2

My adventures in bureaucracy, continued...

While I was contacting various agencies and embassies, Laura reached out to the appropriate people at her office and got yet another contradictory set of information. It also caused a spotlight to be shined on us from the great heights of an international corporate legal department. It turns out that

  1. Our visa renewal was not directly tied to the criminal background check. It was just a case of both needing to be redone at the same time, so all of the letters went out the same day.
  2. We received our new visa with an expiration date of... April 2018, which was a problem. It turned out to be nothing more than a typo. Someone entered the wrong date into a form somewhere. We visited the Kreisburo on Friday and they were apologetic and embarrassed. It's uncommon to see those things here, especially from the normally quite competent government officials. Apparently, the problem had already been detected and new visas were on the way. The corrected documents showed up in the mail today. We're now legally allowed to stay until 2019.
  3. The US Embassy gave us bad information. Thanks, guys. The "affidavit of good conduct" was not a form. It didn't need to be notarized. We certainly didn't need to go to the embassy and pay $100 for it. It was literally a one-sentence letter that said (in German), "I am not a convicted criminal and I have no charges pending against me." Apparently, if your German is bad, you can even go to the Migrationsamt and attest to this in English.
  4. We still need to get fingerprints in an FBI-compatible format. This involves making an appointment at the Winterhur police department.
  5. After we get fingerprints, we need to send them to the US. I'd been planning to use Fedex or UPS, but Legal (or whoever) now wants them to be sent via a Very Official Courier. Fortunately, I don't think that we have to pay for that.
  6. It will take the FBI a few weeks to run the check, but since we've attested that we're not criminals (and who would lie about a thing like that?), we have an entire year to get the results to the Migrationsamt. We have more work to do, but the immediate pressure is gone.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Stinky cheese, man

I'm living in a place that's known for it's cheese. There are hundreds of kinds of cheese at my local grocery store. I try something different every time I go shopping, and I've still barely scratched the surface of what's available. There's one kind of cheese that deserves special mention: Raclette . Raclette is strange for a few different reasons. Most notably, it's almost always served cooked, and there's a bit of a ritual around cooking it. You will never be offered raw raclette. Why? Raw raclette is pungent stuff. It's hard to describe the smell, but I've heard it described as a cross between sweat socks, vomit, and curdled milk. To say that it stinks is a polite understatement. So, why on earth would anyone eat it? Because when you cook it, you somehow cook the stink out of it, and what's left is sublime. It's a sort of oily cheese, and you get something like the best pizza or nacho cheese you've ever had. I've hea...
3 comments
Read more

Sometimes, things work as intended

A small computer success story: I have a Synology NAS at home. For those who aren't familiar with them, they're small computers that are set up to make storing and sharing files easy. They keep your data across multiple hard drives so that if a hard drive fails, no data is lost. Or, at least, that's the theory. After we moved last year, I set up the NAS and ran all of the status checks. It reported that one drive was still working but starting to have problems. I bought another drive, plugged it in, and set it as a "hot spare" (basically, the system knew about it, but it wasn't being used). I also turned on monthly disk checks. Months passed with no more problems. ...until last Tuesday. On Tuesday night, the system automatically sent us mail to tell us that The troubled disk had finally failed. Since we had a hot spare, it would be used as a replacement disk and our data would be copied to it. When everything was finished, the system would let us k...
2 comments
Read more

Actual Size

I get a lot of questions about Switzerland's size. So, I put together a spreadsheet showing Switzerland's size relative to each US State. You can view the full spreadsheet on Google Sheets , but here are some highlights: The two states that are closest in size to Switzerland are Maryland and West Virginia. Maryland is 61% (about 2/3x) of the size of Switzerland. West Virginia is 151% (about 1 and 1/2x) of the size of Switzerland. Pennsylvania is 281% (about 3x) of the size of Switzerland. One of the nice things about living in a small country is the short distance to the borders. I can be in Germany in an hour. France, Lichtenstein, or Austria in 2 hours, or Italy in 4 hours (less when full service through t he Gotthard Tunnel opens later this year). This weekend, we're going to visit... somewhere, and "do you want to go to Milan or Munich" is about as difficult as "Do you want to go to Columbus or Buffalo?"
2 comments
Read more