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

The Virus By the Numbers

I'm writing this because there's some really insane stuff that's being said by people who should really know better, and I'm sick of discussing it one post or email at a time. So, this is my One Big Post that I'll point people toward rather than bringing it up again and again. In case you haven't noticed, we're in the middle of a pandemic. Just so that we're all using the same terminology:  The virus is Severe acute respiratory syndrome Coronavirus 2 . It's usually abbreviated SARS-CoV-2. It's a brand new kind of Coronavirus, so for a while, before it had this awkward name, people were calling it "novel coronavirus". (For the non-English speakers and D students, "novel" is another word for "new".) The disease that the virus causes is called Coronavirus Disease 2019 , and it's usually abbreviated COVID-19. It's called that because it was discovered in 2019. This came out of nowhere in China in late
Post a Comment
Read more

Audio upgrade: Schiit Fulla 2

I recently purchased a Schiit Fulla 2 . I was on the fence about it for a long time, but it's held up well, and I'm pretty happy with it. So, here's a small product review. I should probably mention that I'm generally skeptical about "audiophile" anything. I've known too many people who spend way too much money on voodoo like "oxygen-free speaker cables". This makes me reluctant to trust reviews or spend money on anything that I can't test for myself.  I've heard good audio. I go to concerts. I know what music is  supposed to  sound like, and it wasn't what I was getting from any of my computers, even with decent headphones, lossless audio codecs, etc. On the other hand, we have some  Sonos speakers , and with those speakers and a good audio source, music can sound really good. Since I wasn't getting that level of quality at the computer, it meant that there was something between the computer and my ears that was part of
Post a Comment
Read more

The Chromecast conceptual model

Google makes a device called Chromecast . It's a relatively inexpensive way to turn any TV into a "Smart" TV capable of playing movies or music. It's a clever bit of engineering, but I've run into a few people who have trouble understanding how they work. The key thing to understand is that the Chromecast is the device that's actually receiving and playing the movie (or whatever), and your phone is just the remote. Here's how the process works at a high level: You start watching a video on Youtube 30 seconds in, you decide that you'd like to watch the rest on your TV, so you press the "Cast" button. Your phone stops playing and tells the Chromecast "Get this video directly from Youtube and start playing at the 0:30 mark"  When your phone initially asks the Chromecast to start playing, it also specifies a "default thing" to do when the Chromecast is finished. If the Chromecast is playing a Youtube video, it might
Post a Comment
Read more