British High Commission and VISA

This blog is dedicated to revealing the incapabilities and inefficiency of the British High Commission located in Canberra.

For Australia students who intend to study abroad in the United Kingdom for a period of about 6 months, we are required to attain a student VISA. The VISA is supposably take 25 working days to be processed from the day they receive it in Canberra.

I sent in my application the moment I got my confirmation letter from Manchester Business School, which as around early November (13th Nov to be exact). So counting 25 working days, I should have received it before Christmas. What followed was a series of unexpected delays.

Firstly, the commission closed from the 22 Dec 08 through to 2 Jan 09. This is quite understandable and forgiveable, because to be honest it is Christmas and everyone is entitled to spend it with family. (Not if you work for Myer as a christmas casual). Anyway, so trying to be understanding, I told myself to that I would wait for them to start work again and call them up to chase up my application.

What I got was an enquiry service that charged me around $2.55 a minute to enquire the status of my VISA. Not only did the woman not give me a clear answer as to how much longer I had to wait but she just cut me off by insisting on running a progress report.

Now this progress report is completely useless to begin with. It takes up to 24 hours for the progress report to be processed and the only thing it tells you is that you're application is still be evaluated and 'you will be notified as soon as it is approved'. How useless is that? It pretty much told me nothing. A complete waste of my time and resources.

So a week after the people from the commission had started work again, I called them up to ask them what else they could do for me to hurry up the process. Please note, I was being charged $2.55 a minute every time I called. And guess what, they did not have a fast track service at all. Not even when I explained to them that I had to fly out the next week. I was just told to stay put and wait.

After more chasing up, my VISA was finally approved and I had around 3 days left before the day I was to leave. You would think, 'great, good timing. They'll probably send the VISA on the Friday and you'll get it on the Monday or Tuesday.' Nuh uh, VISA's were only picked up by the couriers on the Tuesday afternoon. (The day that I actually wanted to leave.) The Express mail, which is an air courier, was very helpful in that they had a parcel tracker on their website which could be used to track your parcel. On Tuesday night, my VISA was scanned into the system and early Wednesday morning my parcel was in Sydney and ready for delivery.

At this moment, I was so relieved. I was actually able to breathe but around 11:00, the mail box was still empty. Mum, being mummy, told me to ring up the express mail and ask them where my parcel was. To my surprise, my parcel was labelled undelivered because there was insufficient detail for delivery. In other words, the British High Commission forgot to put my street number in the address.

The next moment, I was out of the door and driving to Green Acre to pick up the parcel instead of waiting for it to be delivered. It was about 1pm when I got back home with my passport and VISA in hand and around 3pm mum booked me onto a 10pm flight. 4pm, my group came over and had dinner with me. 7pm, Hermz drove me to the airport. And 10pm on the dot, I flew out of Sydney.

So, to anyone that is going to UK. Good luck with the British High Commission, I hope they are nicer to you because they were definitely not to me. I paid them to do their job but instead I had to go drive out to the postal headquarters to pick up my own mail because they couldn't correctly put my address on it and they gave me an entire 2 month of stress and anxiety, which probably could have caused a permanent heart condition if everything didn't work out in the end.