Visa application fun

[urocyon]

The British Embassy's "e-fastrack" online visa application system is fairly scary.

When I started filling out the application, I was semi-pleased that the system allows one to save the application and come back. (Reasonably basic, but not always offered.) However, it threw up an incorrect login/password error every time I tried to save. This was a bit nerve-wracking until I noticed that it saved the data anyway, then became merely annoying. I should say, it fairly consistently saved; there was a bit of confusion when vatine went to complete the application, and it offered him first a blank page, then plopped him down about mid-application, in questions I'd supposedly completed.

During several sessions messing with the online form as I got more information, a number of other strange errors popped up. The most disturbing one occurred after I'd saved a page and gone back to the "retrieve application" page, to get around the "incorrect login/password" garbage (with no apparent exit from that page). The displayed application was for some Kishore person's transit visa. As if my confidence needed increasing at that point.

The application itself struck me as a bit strange. Their approach is to determine which application you need from how you answer questions in the first part, rather than allowing you to select the appropriate application. Mine defaulted to "Marriage visa" as I noticed later, which is close enough, with any luck--they do both use a VAF2 form normally. Oddly, not all the questions on the regular VAF2 were asked; I was using the PDF version as a reference for any additional information I might need, since I was only allowed to see the section of the online application I was working on at the time. Some of the text boxes were also miniscule--try to fill in your plans for employment or educational qualifications in 50 characters or less. :)

I was very relieved to have vatine point out to me that the application is now marked as submitted and paid, when he went to poke at it again. Yay! With any luck, the documentation will get there within the next day or so, and the visa will be here in time for the trip the 2nd of April. I suppose I wouldn't be going anywhere otherwise, with no passport, but I wasn't looking forward to trying to enter the UK without a proper visa again, given my apparently flagged passport. Ack.

Comments

[clanwilliam.livejournal.com]

Just read all that. Try what happened to my sister, who lived in Boston.

She was back in Europe for a holiday, which included a month's Eurorail travel. Because she'd moved to the US on the green card lottery, she got a one-way ticket so that future tickets would be US-Ireland rather than the other way around. Sensible, you'd have thought.

So, there she arrives at Gatwick. She has a visa for Czechoslovakia in her passport (or in other words, where they make Semtex). This is in the middle of the collapse of the Iron Curtain. She also has a visa for Morocco (cheap day trip from Spain, but also well-known as a point of entry for getting to Libya where they teach you how to use said Czech product). She also has a one-way ticket to Boston, well-known hotbed of IRA support.

Result: she spent an hour being interrogated by security before they let her on the flight. The scary thing, she said, was that they kept on repeating their questions, including her name - this is the one person in the family who is not known by her first name! (She's Mary Patricia, we've called her Pat all her life to the extent that letters addressed to "Mary" even now make me double-take.)

I was on my first-ever trip to the US when the Canary Wharf bomb went off. We found out a day later. My sister cheerfully phoned round her friends and asked for bets as to whether I'd be pulled in on my return to the UK. Sadly for her, I wasn't (I have at least one known UK security clearance, if not more).

[vatine]

I'm just slightly happy I don't have any business visas and tourist visas from DDR in my current passport (stamps indicate "entering, leaving, extend stay on business visa, entering", all aquired in the first half of september 1989.

As for security clearances, tey tend to not tell you if you have them, in my experience.

[clanwilliam.livejournal.com]

"Known" as in "places I have been that I know they had to check me out for". I doubt my name has ever gone through the full-on process, but I do know I've been checked out and cleared.

[vatine]

Yep. I have, apparently, held one of the higher levels of security clearance in .se (allowed inside computer rooms "of vital significance for national security"), but only reflected on it a couple of years later, when the subject came up in idle chatting around a pot of lapsang.

[urocyon-c.livejournal.com]

Oh dear--that does sound irritating, to put it mildly. I'd imagine that was a jarring experience. It makes me feel almost lucky just to be apparently in the "you've been travelling too much; you must be up to no good" category. The implications are still a bit galling--I've hardly noticed hordes of middle-class Americans and Canadians plotting to go to the U.K. in search of under-the-table employment and (gasp!) benefits. Debating this point with the battle-axe at Passport Control did not seem wise, though.

[reddragdiva]

In our experience, the British immigration folk are remarkably efficient with this sort of paperwork.

[urocyon-c.livejournal.com]

Ah, this is very comforting to hear.