not my kind of excitement

I thought I was going to have such an exciting post for you today.

I've been asking and asking my agency if I could be registered as an independent. They kept saying no. Finally, I told them that I knew a family who was about to be registered as independents (well, the "family" was actually me...another agency was willing to do this) in Leningrad Oblast (the area surrounding St. P, but not St. Petersburg itself). I asked again if they could help me with this. They said they'd check.

Three weeks later, and after a few prompts from me, I heard that yes, it did seem possible. Wow! Exciting post in the making! I was to speak to my facilitators here today to get the details. This all sounded great. The agency said it would be "no problem" for me to come back under their wing, so to speak, once accreditation was granted. Until then, it couldn't hurt for me to be independent.

This morning I called the number they gave me for N. It was actually G., who speaks no English. I told her who I was and she gave me N's number. I called N. at 11:30 a.m. and woke her. Oops. Russian time--I miscalculated. She told me to call V.

I called V. who repeated the same information I'd been e-mailed. And then said that

they still did not have my dossier in the office.

I was gobsmacked, flabbergasted, amazed, bemused, incredulous and just plain unbelieving.

Didn't I just say that I should verify earlier reports that my documents were where they should be? I thought there was a slight possibility that they weren't translated, but never thought they hadn't arrived. I thought with all this time that my agency has now that they're unaccredited, that they'd be extra-on-top of all this paperwork. And that recent plea they made to get all dossiers in so that they could be translated and waiting seemed to me to indicate they had time on their hands.

This is not the sort of excitement I had in mind for this post.

On Monday, the office here will call me and tell me what they have and what they are lacking. I've sent e-mails to the US facilitators and the agency itself (who do nothing, but I still thought they should know) asking if they have confirmation that my documents arrived in Russia. Wouldn't you think that would be part of their job? Making sure paperwork arrived? It's not like they gave me a tracking number so that I could see where things were.

I guess this qualifies as exciting...in an agitating sort of way... Sheesh.