I do not do well filling in official forms.

I suspect I am not alone in this, but most of the official forms I fill in are tax related. The worst that can happen if you fill one in wrongly is that you are prosecuted for tax evasion and end up being fined. All you lose is money, unless you are unusually persistent and successful at evading taxes.

Unfortunately, as I have written before, not being a citizen of the country I live in means that I occasionally interact with the immigration folks here. This means filling in forms which have rather more severe consequences for filling them in incorrectly: deportation is always a good one, for instance.

If the forms were easy to fill in I would probably make myself less ill trying to fill them out, but the questions are quite obscurely worded sometimes and my documentation does not always match what the question appears to be asking for, which leads to some stress. I made myself quite unwell worrying about this last Friday.

Thus I have spent an inordinate amount of time trying to fill in the forms to get a new visa stamp in my passport, gathering the right documentation, obtaining a suitable photo, and generally fretting about whether my answers are right. British Expats has been a very helpful site in this, certainly more helpful than the State Department. I mean, these are people who claim that the two forms I have filled in should each take no more than an hour to complete.

I still want to know if this increased level of bureaucratic obstructiveness has actually achieved anything more than discouraging legitimate visitors, but we may never know. Even the information about speed camera effectiveness in the UK is less one-sided than this.

Anyway, the forms are sent. I've beaten the deadline for the closure of the visa stamp service, and now I just have to wait three or four months until it comes back.

I just hope that I have not made some elementary error which means that they are returned to me with insufficient time to get them resent before the deadline expires.

Posted by Dunx at July 7, 2004 05:13 PM