Casualty

It's sort of funny, I suppose, that the computer that I've written pretty much every permanent residence post on would expire before the tale reaches its conclusion. On Monday night, after being put to sleep for a couple of hours while I watched Contagion on the shiny new Blu-ray player, it never woke up again. Just some blinking lights and a fan whirring. It wasn't even two years old, and had already had the fan replaced after only eight months.

The man at the computer repair shop declared the motherboard dead and a cost $450 to replace it, before even thinking about labour and overheads and so on. Given the money I had paid him just to look at it, he suggested I might as well buy a new one. So here I am, on my third new laptop since 2007. The man who sold me this one on Thursday morning all but admitted to me that the build quality of laptops is going rapidly downhill and that the major companies don't really bother about it since they know this will generate further sales. Charming. I took the new machine to the place the old one was yesterday, and they transferred everything across. A call this lunchtime to tell me to come and pick up, and an afternoon of tinkering and customising I'm roughly where I was on Monday night.

So I made a promise when I picked the new one up yesterday: if this one breaks inside two years, I'm going to the Dark Side, computer wise....

Halfway There

My passport made it to its destination in Los Angeles at 10:20 this morning. Hopefully, it doesn't take long to administer the final approval. There is a drop-box for return parcels in the actual building, so I hope it's back on the return journey soon.

As a reward to myself for keeping (generally) sane, the first two items on the "I can't justify that right now, but I'd like them" list, that have had to wait for eight months have been bought; the first a wireless router for my internet so that after four years I can no longer trip over the modem cable which trailed across the floor. And secondly, I have tonight ordered a BluRay/up-scaling DVD player that is multi region DVD, so that there will again, after four years, be no need to plug the laptop into the TV if I want to watch > 90% of my DVDs. Finally getting with the times.

Trouble is, wandering round the electronics store on Sunday afternoon made me want a bigger TV........

A Week of Winning

To cap a nice week, the Flames won their first home game against Vancouver since October 2009, a run of eight games without a win, and usually severe beatings. They did so by hanging on grimly for the full sixty plus minutes, since they could bring almost zero offensive pressure as they're missing so many injured players at present. They managed to lose another important player during the game. Three cheers for the goalie, and the frame of the goal which must have stopped at least four shots.

After the 9-0 loss in Boston in early January, they are 8-3-3 since, almost all of which is due to Kiprusoff who is in "is he human?" sort of form. The win last night, like the one on Wednesday in San Jose, was a bonus one; a game against a team that should beat them if they were at full strength, let alone the patched up version taking to the ice at present. The Flames fate this season of making the playoffs for the first time since 2008-9 will be determined in the games against Dallas, Phoenix, Minnesota and Colorado, who are all within a couple of points of each other.

Logistics

At some point, there's going to be a relative lack of things to talk about once the immigration thing is at an end. But while I'm in the mood, the next chapter; an object tale of speaking with the organ grinder, and not the monkey.

Given I got my passport request on Wednesday, I have to send my passport - among other things - to Los Angeles. Given the cock-up here, I really didn't want to entrust Canada Post's regular, untrackable service with it on the way back. The instructions on the LA website were quite clear: a prepaid return shipping label on which the billing was noted as 'pre-paid' and not 'bill to account', 'bill to recipient' or an account number. UPS do such things, FedEx don't, their website said. And so return FedEx envelopes wouldn't be acceptable means of transit, and so they'd stick your passport back in the normal post. I didn't fancy that, so went off to my nearest* UPS store, to be met by a man who told me they couldn't issue a return label without using them for the outward trip, but was generally exuding an air of 'i can't be bothered'. My plan of sending it Expresspost (tracked, signed for) and then have the UPS label for the return wouldn't fly. I then tried two FedEx stores to see if LA was wrong and pre-paid labels were possible. The first was derelict, and the second said, "yes, you can issue pre-paid labels but you can't do it here, it has to be online". Home I go to set up an account. 

The FedEx website wouldn't accept my credit card, and so twenty minutes on the phone to the call centre ensued. At that point, I set up the shipment for the outward trip, and then ran into a problem for the return. Back to the call centre; whereupon the woman on the end of the phone essentially lied to me in order to retain my business, assuring me that it was pre-paid and they could do such things. And lo, when I print the shipping label out, it still said bill to xxxx account, which was unacceptable to LA. It had to say pre-paid. LA would just bin the label and stick it in the regular post. Two voided shipments. I set up on the UPS website and effectively the same thing happened. Another voided shipment. So ended a stressful sort of a day; I thought that Wednesday had put paid to those sort of things.

And we're off!

So today saw another trip to the same UPS shop. However, today I got the owner/franchisee, not the person I saw yesterday. I explained again what I wanted and his response was "yes, we can do that, but it's going to be cheaper than Canada Post to send it with us if you combine the charges, rather than them". BINGO; he had me at 'cheaper',  so he had me fill in a form for the outward label while he did the return prepaid one. Half an hour later it was done. Two labels, two tracking numbers, job done. If the man yesterday had been as helpful, there'd have been a much less aggravating sort of day. Remember: go to the top!

* nearest is a relative term here

Famous Last Words

I think I should give serious thought to abandoning science altogether, and start writing comedy instead. Look at these pearls of wisdom from the last year...

Feb 3rd, 2011:
"If the residence thing went speedily, I could be done by September"

March 15th, 2011:
"A rough prediction for when this will be done by might be late September or early October"

May 5th, 2011:
"I could conceivably be done by late summer/early autumn. Everything crossed!"

May 26th, 2011:
"Suddenly, the end of all this is becoming visible on the horizon"

August 10th, 2011:
"If everything goes well, hopefully the last step - the Canadian security check and passport request - will get here in the coming weeks"

August 31st, 2011:

"All being well, I might get my passport request in a month to six weeks"

September 30th, 2011:

 "Hopefully, my case will be resolved very soon. Because I'll go pretty mad if there's another couple of months wait"

October 12th, 2011:

"It's looking like my trip to land might well involve a trip home at Christmas, if they'd ever get their finger out"

October 24th, 2011:

"Hopefully, it'll be my turn soon"

At that point, I seem to have stopped making predictions. Wonder why...

Results

July 2010 (left), August 2011 (middle), February 2012 (right)

So the whole immigration limbo/living off savings thing has had one other good result (apart from the permanent residence thing, obviously). 

Almost 18 months ago, it became obvious that I'd have to save for the period I wouldn't be able to work beyond the end of my contract at work, due to how long it was going to take for permanent residence to be completed. Economies had to be made somewhere. That meant an end to pre-processed junk food, cooking from scratch a lot more and not buying lunch every day at work, taking a packed lunch instead.

Combined with the great broken ankle saga, it ultimately ended up in a calorie-limiting diet, roughly speaking consuming roughly 2500 calories less per week than 'maintenance' level. The ankle thing doubtlessly accelerated the whole thing and I wouldn't recommend it. Because the immigration process took so long, there ended up being more than one set of photos taken for the process which became completely useless. So now I have a desk drawer full of them, and a visual record of my progress, since the shop concerned stamps the date on the back of them.

For someone who once upon a time had no patience for things like this, it's demonstrative of what you can do over the course of a long time with just a tiny bit of willpower and the banning of baked goods. Look at the photos! The left one, I'm 215 lbs, the middle about 175, and the right one 165. I'm still very sad that bacon baguettes and ice cream are off the menu though....

News

Finally!!

It looks like the email I sent them the other week finally shamed them into doing something. I got up this morning to an email from the freedom of information office in Ottawa. It being an governmental communication and everything being bilingual, it was done by someone French with only a moderate grasp of the English language.

It explained to me that they sent me an email in early January telling me they'd need up to a further sixty days, but it hadn't got through since they missed the last bit of my email address off. Whoops. So I was in something of a grumpy mood that I'd potentially have to wait another month to find out what the problem was. Not ten minutes after reading that, my phone beeped again. More incoming gmail. Except this time it was the email you see above right. Yes, my email of last Saturday had finally borne fruit. I was entertaining emailing my MP next week, but now I don't have to bother. They have finally requested my passport, and I've been approved. I spent the afternoon having yet more photographs taken, buying mailing envelopes and so on. The UPS courier website so comprehensively confused me to such a degree this afternoon that I'll have to visit a store tomorrow to get the pre-paid shipping label for the return trip from LA to here.

This being all done, a trip home, and a job for the next few months mean things are finally beginning to look up.

An Answer

Not an answer from Los Angeles, since I'm beginning to think I'll see a squadron of pigs fly past my window on final approach to the airport, but a more general answer to a question that puzzles me: yes, there are actually people - real human beings - working in the government immigration services. They aren't just whole buildings populated by computers sending automated replies. 

I had found, a couple of weeks ago, on the information goldmine that is BritishExpats.com, a phone number for the Regional Medical Office in Ottawa. Having received no reply from my last enquiry to Los Angeles, I rang the number this morning. The forum above described the lady on the end of the phone as 'nice'. It must have been a different lady since she scolded me for ringing what wasn't a public number. Here's a helpful hint: don't have a phone if you don't want the public to contact you. After all, the immigration section in Los Angeles have taken that approach. After I finally managed to persuade her there was no way to contact CIC LA, she asked "why don't you email them?" 

Me, inwardly: "HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA".

Me, on the phone: "they don't respond to them".

After giving her my file number and clientID, I told her all I wanted was confirmation they received the results, and an indication of whether they had processed them. "We sent the results to Los Angeles months ago. They were processed fairly soon after receipt". This corroborates another one of my faceless immigration contacts on trackitt.com (the thing i post screenshots of), who got exactly the same reply today from his/her immigration doctor, who had presumably contacted the same office in Ottawa.

So my main theory as to why my application has taken so long has been blown out of the water. If they've assessed my case, asked me for my medicals, received the (apparently satisfactory) results, it means the only things at this point that explain what is going on (or rather the lack of it) is either I am victim of some sort of quota system, or my security check is lagging. I'd be able to confirm that with a printout of my file, but it still hasn't arrived after two months (listed time: 30 working days). I emailed them on Friday. Guess what sort of reply I got.....