Immigration stamp

Yay, we've got our visas for India

Since the last post we’ve been not-so-patiently waiting for the return of our Visas. As the visa applications were handed in at the application centre in Victoria they had effectively been fully checked and approval was a 99% certainty. I wasn’t therefore too worried that we wouldn’t get our visas but nevertheless I don’t like someone else having my passport.

Due to a slight cock-up Jane and my visas would be delivered seperately by Royal Mail. The girls’ visas would be delivered seperately by the visa centre’s courier, DX.

The lady at the application centre had told me to check the status of the applications from Tuesday 31st May but I forgot and didn’t check them until the following day, only to find that they were already in the post, due for delivery that day. I’d never realised the turnaround would be so quick, but what a weight of my mind, we only had to wait for them to arrive.

Jane was in for the morning but emailed me when she went out at 12:40pm to say the visas hadn’t arrived. I checked the Royal Mail web site at 2pm to find they’d attempted to deliver them 9 minutes after Jane left. No worries though, the collection depot is only a few miles away so I could pick them up later.

I left work pretty sharpish at 4pm, got home at 4:25 to find that the DX courier hadn’t yet been, excellent. Checked the tracking for DX and they’re still due to be coming today. At 6pm nothing had arrived, I checked the tracking site to find that DX “could not access the property”. Brilliant, so their only job is to find an address, knock on a door and had over the passports and they can’t even do that.

After calling DX and hanging on the phone for 40 minutes I gave up. The next day was the same so I opted to re-arrange the delivery to my work, a whopping big building that surely they couldn’t miss.

DX say that someone must sign for the delivery and show some form of identity for the addressee. I’d prepped everyone in the office but it didn’t matter, DX turned up and just left them at reception, without seeing any form of identification.

Oh well, who cares? We’ve got our visas within 6 working days of putting them in.