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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.

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