If an adult showed up alone with a baby? They would've been turned away. Parents who came in pairs had to take turns with their kid outside, where there was no shelter and no place to sit. In 4C weather, I saw a frozen woman cradling a baby in arms as she paced in the wind.
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Specifically: having received our application at their first processing centre, the visa authority took our money, made NO OTHER RECORD OF OUR APPLICATION, and then send our docs on to their other centre, via the REGULAR-ASS UNPROTECTED MAIL SERVICE, whose post depot flooded.
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Ours was not the only application thus affected. In fact, we were later told by the Australian consulate, fuckups of this nature are *common* to the UK visa authority, who are apparently known for being careless with documents, slow, & generally incompetent by other governments.
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So: we need new passports in order to leave the country. But to get new passports, we need new supporting documentation. And all those documents WERE ALSO LOST. And me? My passport is my only photo ID. So we had to get my mother IN AUSTRALIA to get a new birth cert for me.
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We then had to organise, and pay out of pocket for, a two-day trip to London (where the consulate is) FROM ABERDEEN, to get new passports in an expedited, not-reliant-on-the-Royal-Mail fashion. Which, again, cost us about £2000 out of pocket. It KILLED our savings.
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In the end, the UK visa authority refunded us for the application they couldn't process, and returned our "lost" documents (which evidently weren't destroyed by water after all) to us. But by then, it was late in 2016, almost a full year after we'd applied, and we were in Aus.
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We never recovered or were compensated for the additional £2000 we lost having to sort things out, and because of THEIR ERROR, the UK visa authority now flags all our passports whenever we enter the UK, because for some reason, they need a re-explanation of what happened.
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The entire 5 years we lived in the UK - as well-off, white, English-speaking, Commonwealth citizens - the UK visa authority was a hostile, incomprehensible, unpleasant, stressful entity to deal with. That's it's baseline mode: it is profoundly more vile to anyone less privileged.
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It's a cold, hard fact that dealing with the UK visa authority trashed both my husband's and my mental health and left us in a financial hole which, without the support of solvent, caring family members, we would never have climbed out of. Years later, we're only just recovering.
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How an entity so comprehensively dedicated to intransigence and bureaucratic pettifogging can possibly hope to deal with the hugely expanded workload necessitated by a hard
#Brexit is beyond me. They simply won't cope, and any UK citizens wanting visas should beware.Show this thread -
In all respects, the UK visa authority almost perfectly fits the description that Douglas Adams famously gave to his Vogons: "Not actually evil, but bad-tempered, bureaucratic, officious and callous" - the "almost" is because these days, yeah: they actually ARE evil, too.
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In conclusion: the marriage of xenophobia and bureaucratic incompetence is one of the ugliest in the modern world, and that's saying something. The UK isn't alone in perpetuating this particular evil, so let it be a lesson to everyone on a similar path to FIX THAT SHIT NOW. FIN
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End of conversation
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