Mission Impossible II

As this image shows, Tom Cruise is a whack-job mentalist. However, he is not alone. It would seem that after our 2nd Trip through to Edinburgh today the people who run the Australian Consulate are also mentalists.

This time we found the place without a problem and were greated by a nice sectretary who said that there were 3 people in front of us and we should just take a seat on one of the nice lobby couches. When I say lobby, I mean it was more of a hallway that had a ridiculous amount of through-traffic from all the other companies that share that building (I counted 23 on the plaquard behind the receptionist) and weirdly they all seemed to use the same receptionist. Although to her everything was "no problem" and by the 15th time she had said that down the phone I wanted to beat her within an inch of her life with the Bill Bryson novel that Isla was reading.

After about 45 minutes a plump girl with less dress sense than colour-blind cave-woman that buys her mirrors from "the Hall of Mirrors" and shops at the Sally-Army called us into The Consultate. I guess I shouldn't have been surprised when the consulate official showed us into her office and it looked a great deal like this one <-------. There was a single desk, three chairs, a small filing cabinate and a wastepaper basket. I don't really know what the bin was for as the only things on the desk were a pen, a pad of post-it notes (the small ones) and a rubbish plastic Australian desk-flag. There certainly wasn't anything electronic and no sign of a computer.

None-the-less we told the girl of our situation and she said that "The Consulate" only deals with passports in her jumbled accent (actually think that she was Canado-Pole working in the Australian Consulate in Scotland - Mentalists I tells ya!). Instead she phones her head office and they give her the number for some department in the High Commission in London that deals with this kind of thing. So we thank the girl and she says something along the lines of "Good luck wubba weeba and have a bree brinnng great mungbean holiday" like a fat Polish R2-D2/Jar-Jar cross. (She wasn't that bad but I was getting a bit worked up with the fact that we'd spend loads of time trying to sort this mess out and so far not really got anywhere. It's not that I don't like going through to Edinburgh. It's just that it reminds me how shit Glasgow is.)

Anyway we headed home and got into the flat just after 4pm. I pulled the number out of my backpack which was stuck to my passport (don't you love Post-its?) and called it. It rang once then went to an automated message. I'll not bore you with the details but 3 things are important 1) "This is only a message. To speak to a human you'll have to phone our other number 2) their offices are only open 9am-4pm and so it was already closed for the day and 3) the number it gave us to call was a premium rate £1 per minute number! The irony of all this was when Jar2-D2 was writing down the number she told us "Call this one as the one on the website costs £1 per minute beep beep". ARGH!!!

So far this caper has cost us about £40 in train and underground tickets and we are still none the wiser as to what we are supposed to do about our visa/passport mix up. If they tell us tomorrow that we have to go to London I'll... well I don't know what I'll do as we have neither the time, the cash, nor the inclination to go down there, especially at this time of year. I guess we'll find out in about 15hours.