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| London, United Kingdom |  Review on January 3, 2007: |
JenandJerry
Rating:  | Review Topic: K3 Visa
Everyone else seems to only be marking the London Embassy for their performance on the day of the interview. Like others here, our interview was very fast and efficient, which is why we are giving them two out of five and not zero. As the London embassy took over the processing of our application from the NVC in August, we think it is fair to mark their overall performance since then.
We received our package three promptly, just two days after the embassy took charge of our case from the NVC. From this point on, things went downhill. After sending in our completed checklist, we waited nearly seven weeks before we got our package four. We would have been waiting much longer, had we not been advised by fellow applicants on this forum, to resend our checklist after not hearing back for four weeks. The embassy never acknowledged that they had lost our paperwork, but we believe it's too much of a coincidence that two weeks after resending the checklist, we suddenly had an interview date.
During this very stressful time we tried to contact the embassy and it is the nonsense we had to put up with trying to do this, that is the main reason for our poor mark. The only way to actually talk to a person is to call the Visa "Helpline" which is a premium rate number (1.20 per minute) based in Glasgow where they are absolutely no help whatsoever. The only thing they can do for you is give you a reference number which allows you to email the embassy. Without this number, the embassy will completely ignore your emails and even with it, will take around five days to respond (it took them 4 weeks for one of ours). When the embassy do eventually deign to answer your email it will either be a terse automated mail telling you not to mail them again or a useless answer to the effect that you'll just have to wait. In case you think we were bombarding the embassy with emails, we have in fact mailed them a grand total of five times in four months. Hardly unreasonable.
Eventually we got an interview and on Thursday 21st December, everything went swimmingly. Unlike other people here, however, I was not asked to raise my hand and swear to tell the truth and the guy did not welcome me to America, but simply said "Your paperwork is in order" (I really hope that isn't important). He then sent us to the Secure Mail Services desk, where we were told my passport would be sent to me within 5 working days. Today (Jan 3rd) is the 5th working day and SMS have not even received my passport from the Embassy yet, let alone delivered it to me. I've now been told by SMS that it can take 10 - 15 working days, but have no way of verifying that. Managing expectations is not really a strong point for any of the people involved in this process.
We have now had to rearrange our flights to America twice at considerable cost.
Altogether a pretty shoddy performance and we haven't even got my visa yet....
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Consulate / USCIS Member Review #1171