Big Brother Smiles

Kane and I are currently jumping through the numerous and gratuitous hoops to try to transfer our visa to a Work and Holiday Visa, which would allow us to work for a limited time in this country. You may be aware of this situation from previous blog entries, but to summarize, we are currently on a travel visa whereby we cannot work legally. We were expecting to be sponsored by potential employers for a work visa, which has not happened yet. A new visa has just become available to US citizens that allows us to conditionally work in Aus, and that's the visa we're trying to get so that we are more desirable to potential employers. The annoying thing is that we have to be outside of the country when we apply for and when we receive this visa. So for that and other reasons, we are headed to New Zealand.

So, of course, the application process is not very clear on the government website. I therefore fired off an extensive email that I assumed would either be overlooked, not answered in any helpful way, or responded to long after I needed the information. However, to my surprise, I received a very long email from the immigration office this morning. I assumed it would be full of random ramblings that don't really answer my question, but it wasn't. An actual person actually read my email, found the answers to my questions, and typed out intelligible answers in a prompt response. Does any of this sound like government to you? No, me neither. Big brother (and Moe, as pictured) smiles on me today.

Not only that, but the information that the lady sent me was exactly what I wanted to hear. My application is not as complicated as I had originally thought, we don't need to get a bunch of stuff notarized, and the wait time for our visa is typically 48 hours if all goes smoothly. So, unless this lady is yanking my chain and laughing her ass off over it in her cubicle (which I think is justification for a person to be sent to hell in the afterlife), we are hopefully going to be able to get through this and still enjoy our vacation. Add a drop of faith in the government bucket for me.