I win!

Today, only four weeks* after we discovered I would have to play the same crazy immigration documentation game that took Geekman three months to master, I ticked the final box of page 13 of form 80, in which the Immigration Department cunningly tricks terrorists into betraying their identities...


... signed off all the documentation, paid (ridiculous sums of money) for my stamped signed sealed translations-by-accredited-translators, stuffed these into an envelope along with multiple copies of police records from ninety million countries and the sealed secret 28-page results of the most extensive (and expensive!) medical examinations I have ever undertaken (the outcome of which I am infuriatingly not allowed to know). This morning Geekman delivered this appetising bundle of bureaucracy to the slathering bureaucrats who requested it, and now all we have to do is sit back and wait for them to tell us we did it wrong.

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* I initially predicted that this would take months and months. The main reason we managed to be so efficient this time is that Geekman had kept meticulous notes on all the steps he had gone through when he did this last year, so we already had copies of the required forms and phone numbers and addresses of the organisations and translators we had to contact. Miraculously the health screening people were able to fit me in at a week's notice and do everything in one day, whereas last year Geekman had had to wait six to eight weeks for each of his tests. Finally, we have become masters of parallel processing, and had multiple forms and requests on the go at once, unlike last time where we were too scared of screwing things up so made sure each step had worked out before setting out on the next one.