Embassy and visas

So we got a moving and packing date. All we need is a visa.

To get a visa, you need to send off a bunch of forms, to Corporation of Future Employment, who give them to their lawyer, who gives them to the INS. They sit on them for X weeks (where X is an unknown value) and then give them back to your lawyer, with an additional magic form, who sends them to you.

When you have the forms you can go to the US embassy in London, have an interview (what are they going to ask? I've no idea) and then they post you a visa. Which all sounds, in principle, relatively straightforward. However, there's a 6 week wait for an appointment at the embassy. So you make an appointment, making some assumptions about the value of X.

If you wait until the date of the appointment, and then find you don't have your magic form back from the INS, you have to wait 6 weeks for a new appointment. So you estimate, and then (in my experience) you get it wrong.

Getting it wrong means you need to make a new appointment (which involves a £1.30 / minute phone call - "Thank you for calling the US embassy appointment line. For training purposes, your call may be recorded. If you would like to ..." AAAGGGGHHHH!!!

However, then the earliest appointment you can get is (again, in my experience) after all your stuff has been packed, and people are moving into your house. Which is slightly inconvenient. So we are moving out of the house on the 25th August, but not leaving until at least the 4th of September.