… Aww, the waiting game sucks, let’s play Hungry Hungry Hippos!
That’s right, we got the application mailed off to the London Visa Center, I mean Centre, so now we finally get to take a breather while the paperwork winds it’s way through the bureaucracy. My understanding is that they’ll first go through the application to make sure that all the points we claimed are legitimate and will call my work references to verify I worked there and did what I say I did, and that my experience doing GIS is legitimate. Assuming that all checks out we’ll then do a phone interview with our case officer to assess my chances of finding employment and ability to settle in and contribute. I’m pretty sure those are the basic steps, but as far as timing, could be two weeks, could be 6 months. I imagine it depends on a lot of different things, including how many other applications are coming in right now, how easy or complicated our application (and especially my work history) is to verify and who knows what else.
I’ll also mention last week because, in addition to more collating of papers, it also involved our medicals. There is only one doctor office in Colorado that performs them (they cover NZ, Canada and Oz) and it’s out in Aurora. They were amazingly pricey for what amounted to a 10 minute exam of our hearts, lungs, eyes and nervous systems, and a blood test. Unfortunately we also had to get chest x-rays. I say unfortunately not because getting chest x-rays is terrible, but because it was at a different office in the Denver Tech Center about 25′ away. By the time we were done it was almost lunch time and the whole morning had been consumed getting poked and prodded. Or, more accurately, waiting to get poked and prodded. It was too late to drop Hopscotch off at school by the time we were done so I ended up taking the rest of the day off and staying home with her,
So that’s it. All the preparation is done, now we just take a breath after the commotion of getting the application ready, and wait for whatever comes next.
Kiwi Bound 