Eleven into five hundred and thirty don’t work

I’m a foreigner…an English one at that - 45th generation Roman – supporter of my country and my country’s allies. So it came as a major surprise when, returning from my delightful skiing jaunt in France, I was hauled, along with my 10 year old daughter, away from the regular passport control / Immigration check to a room at the end of the yellow line – “Denmark II”.

Denmark II is a roughly-square room with a row of small glass walled rooms at one end (the back, really) numbered sequentially, 1-8; 5 or 6 rows of hard plastic chairs, their backs facing these rooms and, at the front three desks supporting the weight of a printer, three computer screens and the elbows of three government agency officials clad in dark blue shirts over turtle neck shirts. Two of the three officers were women - one Hispanic, the other Afro-American. Their conversation consisted mainly of a new diet that seemingly they should have been on around the time they started to walk. They were upset that it was already past 5 o’clock – they’d been on duty all day, don’t forget, and had need of a supervisor’s signature.

Various comings and goings of various other officers were interspersed with the odd, stern shout out of ‘MY-OR-ELL-ETH HOR-HAY-TA” or "Foong-chee Waaaaa" (no I don’t speak Spanish, Cantonese, Haitian, Portuguese, Maian or Mandarin) at which point people (I assume with names like Whorehater or Waaaaa) would stand up, look behind them to see if the call came from a special sound proof torture booth or the front desk and that’s it. Stand. No other visual clues were given…the two big (ok they just ate well - continually) girls hid behind their monitors, the raised eyebrows of the ‘victim’ serving as a sign that they wanted to come forward and admit sins.

With well-timed reluctance on the part of the government agency yahoo (I’ll call them GAY for short), the victim was motioned to again. An entertaining and seemingly endless supply of victims brought forth work and gainful employment to the GAYs. We, victims that is, were clearly outnumbered – it appeared that the GAYs had so little to actually do that I overheard conversations about cake, diets, the game, a promotion opportunity and the woman in Torture Booth 6, the teeth of that guy on the end…and so on. There certainly was something rotten about this Danish room.

Anyway why have I started this monologous soliloquy? Because I was there…you see I was given a visa to work in this country – without which I have to leave within 10 days…I don’t get to crawl over border quality, barbed, razor wire…. they don’t allow us to do that at the airport – and it lasts for three years. The visa, that is. So, when and if you want to stay for longer, you ask for an extension. They give it to you, if you’re nice… I gots myself one of them….it lasts till Oct 2006.

The funny thing is (this is a précis of a quote, contemporaneously noted)…having left the Western Hemisphere (now anyone show me that on a world globe!!!) and committed a ‘meaningful departure’ then my extension authorization doesn’t allow me to get back in the country…it only allowed me to stay here when I was here. But where is the Western Hemisphere? Well it includes Mexico and Canada. So what if I were to have traveled to Canada would I have this issue? No. What about Mexico? No. What if I went to Mexico and then left the Western Hemisphere? Grey area but OK really. And Canada? Same. So the fact that I departed US soil for Europe instead of other Western Hemisphere Soil for the same destination and chose to fly to US soil first before these other contiguous countries caused me a 4 hour delay and a missed flight.

There’s more. The horror, the horror… We had a choice at this stage – go back to England, make an appointment at the US embassy in London (2 weeks typically), hand them my passport along with Evie’s, wait a couple of days, go back to London to collect the passport with super shiny visa sticker and return.. OR it seems in this Elevated Significant Risk of Terrorist Attack Era, money also works (not that terrorists have access to such resources…but I digress). So with a click and a cha-ching of my shiny all American credit card, the immigration folk saw fit to take $265 for each passport I had with me, a whopping $530. I figure they took two photographs (they had them already but they thought they’d take them again), 4 fingerprints (two of mine and two of Evie’s), and completed 2 forms about why there were charging me this money. In return I was given one two inch by one inch receipt, two non-reclining rear seats on a completely full plane, and a bad taste as to the efficiencies and bureaucracies in any ‘massive’ system.

So, my friends, I think the math is easy; 11 into $530 don’t work.