Review for April 4th, 2023

I give today 1 star, I do not recommend it and I will not purchase this day again.

For those following our “Let’s move to Italy” plan, today was an important one. Our Meet With the Italian Consulate in San Francisco Day. I have been working my tail off for the last two months to get our visa applications ready to submit. I was determined to have the best looking, most organized applications they had ever seen. I was going to make their job so easy that they might just give us the visas right there on the spot. Or at least say, ‘well, I can’t tell you anything definitive but no one could find anything wrong with these!’. I had three 3-ring binders, 850 pages, and binder tabs that matched the highlighted lines which matched the sticky notes. It was a feat of organization and was missing nothing. Even our lawyer, who warned us that consulate officers can be really nasty said that “only someone cruel (and dull) would fail to appreciate this application”.

Guess what? I bet you can guess.

If the Russian military designed robots to intimidate people in government offices they would come up with something very similar to the man we worked with today. I was prepared for grumpy. I was prepared for difficult. I was prepared for silly requirements. I was not prepared to deal with someone who didn’t have one shred of humanity in him. Without a greeting or acknowledgement of the fact that I am an actual person, and without a glance at my beautiful binders, he made me dismantle them and started shoving my pages back at me, asking questions like “Is there a reason this is in here?” The reason, as I told him, so, so politely was that our immigration lawyer said we should definitely include it. This application was a reflection of probably two hundred hours of work. Quite possibly more. Papers I never even knew existed had to be located, notarized, reissued, ordered, and begged for. This man tore them apart in a matter of minutes, kept about half, and shoved them together in a crazy, messy pile precariously held together with a mostly broken binder clip.

This is a challenging visa to get. We were professionally coached on an application strategy and I followed the directions exactly. I wrote a heartfelt letter explaining the why and how of our plan, that I felt represented our family and situation well. Did this man care? Sadly, no. In fact he told us there was “no such thing” as the way we had been told to apply. I’d been feeling 90% sure we would get this visa and he knocked me down to 10% with a few bitter sentences. He made me cry. He made me sweat. He made me walk a mile to a post office to get three separate money orders (one for each of us) instead of accepting the one I already had for all three of us together. And I know for a fact that he did it just to be mean. I know because the happiest he was during our whole interaction was the moment he gave me directions to the post office and they included going up one of those San Francisco hills that is so steep that the sidewalk has stairs.

And you know what was happening during the post hill climb part of the appointment? Our ten year old was melting down on the sidewalk outside the consulate and being a total jackass. Just to add a little oomph to the situation.

I have been alternating laughing and crying all day since we left the office (the office, by the way was a real let down. I expected something grand and official but instead it was like a small, extra ugly DMV with a slit in the plexiglass wall to slide papers through.) We were not able to pull the day together after the appointment. We ate a pretty good lunch but it was $150 for two pizzas, a salad and two (tiny) glasses of wine because it’s San Francisco. We got in a traffic jam trying to leave the city in the evening and we are now in a weird hotel in Santa Cruz where we were supposed to celebrate. Instead, I’m in a fight with my husband, I’m pretty sure my kid is a spoiled brat and I’m listening to them both grossly snoring while I type this.

The good news is that the application process is now out of our hands. We will know something in 10-90 days. (That’s right, that’s the range.) The other good news is that I am still proud of the work I did and any reasonable person would’ve been impressed. And the last good thing is that I will not have to live this day again tomorrow. I say that all categories – service, value, comfort, quality and cleanliness all get one star. Maybe cleanliness get two stars because I didn’t step in any of the dog poop I saw all over the sidewalk.

Update April 6th: After some back and forth with our lawyer I am feeling much more hopeful. She was horrified on our behalf and reassured me that I did everything right. She said that although the consulate has ultimate discretion to approve or deny our applications, the reasons the mean man gave me that were so discouraging are actually against Italian law. The hope now is that the higher ups who actually make the decision are more reasonable. It would be hard to be less. So now we wait.