A Thousand Bee Stings

With exception to those who suffer anaphylactic shock from a single bee sting, the rest of us are relatively unscathed by the same. But a thousand bee stings can kill a person, or at the very least, be a real buzz-kill (pun intended and not). So goes my odyssey back to Oxford as a real student who will be living there for approximately one year – or one year at a time. And so went my day from hell when I awoke to find a few official-type emails indicating that I had not fulfilled the plethora of requirements to gain such lengthy access to the U.K.

Everything had been in order: my airplane ticket had been purchased, I had my offer and visa letters from Oxford, my passport, my bank matters straightened out, bank statements printed out, my agenda for what I was to do when I got to Oxford, my schedule, and so on. I had chatted at length with my dear friend Julie in the U.K., and had spoken with Sib; we had planned out the details of meeting at Gloucester Green on Friday. I was in heaven; that was Monday. I was very excited and could barely contain myself – I was going to the place I had grown to love, was going to see the people I loved, and would soon be reunited with him.

By Tuesday, everything was thrown into the air – including my airline ticket. This is part of the education I suppose, and in hindsight, though I am terribly heartbroken about certain things, it is better to find out and deal with things now, as opposed to later on in the U.K. I experienced Charlie Brown’s famous line: “Just when you figure out the game, they change the rules…” In August of this year (this month, coincidentally), a new system or a new addendum to the current system was implemented to obtain visa clearance. The powers-that-be on both sides of the pond have plans to administer national identity cards for folks like me. I thought that I had done everything, but this was not the case. The very worst part was that I had to make that awful call to Sib and break the bad news: my flight would be delayed (for a few days – but what a heartbreaker!).

I was told to rely on the internet to guide me through the international student vis process, but I must say, there is a downside to the internet: there are just too damned many links, links to links, and permutations of the heading, “visa requirements” that can baffle even the most prodigious boffin out there. It is my belief that I have clicked on every link and website at least once, if not several times when websites would reroute me to some site I’d already visited. To make matters worse, there were too few humans with whom I could speak, and when I managed to find telephone numbers, asterisks littered these numbers: $3.00 per minute for toll-free calls; $12.00 flat fee to be charged by credit to speak to a knowledgeable person (of which I have thus far spent $24.00 for assistance), or recorded lines that hung up on me stating something to the effect of, “Please contact [the contracted service (the one that costs $12.00)] – call volume is too high for us to respond to your enquiries.” Click.

On the upside, after my second $12 purchase, I received a list (not a link) of licensed “visa expeditors/agents” recommended to assist people like myself. I decided to personally contact and hire the expert myself. I called Jack at Advanced Visa Service who informed me that many students travelling abroad for school were similarly pulling their hair out and quite stressed. This didn’t make me feel any better; it was not a kumbaya moment for this momentarily disenfranchised student. Apparently, things “are getting much tighter since 911…” as if it hadn’t been from the start. The Department of State and the U.K.’s equivalent (as well as other countries) are set on creating a system that would prevent fraud and illegal immigration, and would create a more global database, as well as ways to deter further acts of terror, and so on. To add to this, there is now a Points-Based System (PBS) wherein international students are recommended to score 40 points so that they can have the full privileges of a Tier 4 Student visa. Students have to show that they have enough money to cover tuition and ₤600 per month for two months for living expenses. If they’ve done this and gotten their bioscans and whatnot, they can work up to 20 hours, open a bank account, and study. I will have achieved this IF I get my feet on the ground in the U.K. I will kiss the ground in Oxford when I arrive (for sanitary purposes, I’ll most likely simply blow a kiss at Oxford and touch a grassy patch therein).

Upon Jack’s advice, I went directly to another biometric processing center on a walk-in basis and the proceeded directly to see him in Arcadia. Another knock on the internet: they didn’t mention that one can simply walk in and get the biometric processing done; they give out sparse dates from which to choose to make an appointment. Had I known that, I could have simply walked in and gotten everything done much earlier on – all in a ten minute span without as much as a wait! Who puts these websites and systems together? What are they thinking? To what end? Organization? Pox on gigantic systems that move like the Titanic!

I was bent on getting as much as possible done – even if I wasn’t flying to the U.K. on Thursday as planned; I’d be damned if I had to prolong my stay here! Truth is – I’ll probably end up being damned for my pit bull doggedness. Jack immediately sent me over to my bank to get an official statement of my finances and then to the nearest passport photo venue in the area. I did as I was told and brought everything back to him. Here’s the scary part: I had to relinquish my passport, my offer letter, my official bank statement, and my biometric processing papers to him so that he, in turn, could take these items to the British Consulate to have the visa stamp applied to my passport, which would authorize me to study in the U.K. from a purely border crossing perspective. Upon doing so, I wrote a check for $99.00, and sighed heavily.

For the next day-and-a-half, my fate rests upon a man and a process I barely understand. Meanwhile, I added everything up, including the change of flight penalty and additional fees to book a different flight (profit-making redundancy once again), and I ended up spending a LOT of money. It’s not like I have that kind of money to dump; I am literally (after tuition is paid) a starving student. Furthermore, I had placed several calls to the U.K. earlier in the day, and had to do a lot of asking-around. To roughly quote a postcard I bought in Oxford, “The more I know, the less I know…” Visa-speak has its own lexicon, and the more complicated the terms and procedures get, the more lucrative the contracts will most likely be for those who sign on to explain the same to travel-ignorant people – to people like me. I think I got stung a thousand times on Tuesday, but I’m starting to recover – even if I’m still hurting a bit and am a lot sad… I will get there! Intact. I will not be defeated, yo.