All because of a tiny little tab

Tuesday afternoon I got an email from my case worker. The subject was "Consulate Situation" and since we were expecting to have our Article 5 picked up this week from the Consulate, a "situation" didn't sound very good. It wasn't. Apparently, they had not received all our documents and weren't able to process our file. (Never mind the fact that our file was cabled to them from the National Visa Center (NVC) on 9/23 and no one noticed it was incomplete.) I called NVC immediately, (immediately, considering they are notorious for making you wait 30+ minutes on hold before you actually speak to a human being) and found out they had only received 12 pages from USCIS (NBC). I could hardly sleep that night for fear of what had happened. Had all our documents been lost? Was it going to require coming up with new ones and having to snail mail them somewhere? If that's the case, there's no way we'd get Sophia by the end of the year... thus, the sleepless night.

I was up by 6:00 am yesterday morning and on the phone with our I800 officer and her manager. (They're 2 hours ahead of me and I called as soon as they opened!) They did some research, called me back an hour later and told me what had happened. Apparently, when our file had been approved back on 9/10, someone placed the tab in the wrong place to indicate which papers in our file were to be sent to NVC, so only 12 were sent. (Never mind the fact that in all the years our officer has worked there, she's never seen a file only 12 pages long and wondered along with me why no one at the NVC paid any attention to that detail.) The good news was, they had all the documents there and she promised me she would get it taken care of that day. Five hours later, that sweet woman called to tell me she finally had them all scanned in and figured out how to break it into five, zipped emails to send to the directly to the consulate and to the NVC. They don't have high speed scanners there, or the ability to send large files, so this was a big deal for her to do, but since it was obviously their fault, she did it for me.

So, the Consulate had it in their system by the time they got to work Thursday morning and after another restless night and hoping against all hope that they would still process our file and have our Article 5 ready for pickup as scheduled, since they only allow pickups on Monday's and Thursday's, I called my case worker this morning to find out what the "situation" is now. Our agency reps went to pick up papers this morning and hopefully get ours. Did they? Are you ready for this???... NOPE. And no explanation of when it will be.

What's wrong with these people??? Don't they know this little Princess is waiting on us to come get her???

Monday's a comin' though (seems like I've said that a time or two in this waiting game...) and hopefully it will be ready for pickup. And THEN, we'll begin our official wait for our travel approval. But for now, we continue to wait for something we should already have. All because of a tiny little tab.