Back to the drawing board...
So my appointment today at the Portland Office of the USCIS turned out to be fairly pointless. While the nice lady behind the counter could sympathise with my situation (I seem to get a lot of that!), there was nothing she could do. The power to issue interim employment documents has recently been stripped from the local offices, meaning that now only the four big processing centres have that ability. The local centres can fax a request further up the line, but only if an I-765 application is currently in progress... which mine isn't.
So there's nothing for it but to refile a new I-765 at the new ridiculous price of $340 (compared to the old $180) and then sit back and wait. The only new bit of advice that I got was to include a covering letter with my application that asks for "expedited processing" based on the financial hardship that not being able to work causes. It doesn't guarantee anything, but if the supervisor on duty that day is in a really, really nice mood, it could bring the processing time down from three months to perhaps one and a half. Maybe.
Anyway, I completed my new application this evening and it's ready to be mailed off to the man and the monkey in Nebraska tomorrow... I wonder which one is the supervisor?
If it's even a half-decent day tomorrow, I just want to go on a big long bike ride somewhere and get all this frustration out of my system.
Posted in: chaosboy, immigration, portland, united states on October 15, 2007 at at 6:16:00 PM