The squeeky wheel gets the grease
Well, we gathered up all of the relevant paperwork and information to make our case, and my wife called Sen. Allen's office this morning. His office has a dedicated immigration assistance specialist, who was very nice, and at least tried to be helpful. She informed us that we should have applied for the renewed work permit more than 90 days in advance, and that BCIS normally advises people as such. My wife informed her that a BCIS employee SPECIFICALLY told us that we could not apply early. This caused some surprise, but the final word was that nothing could really be done. The specialist told us that she would make some phone calls however, in an attempt to get us an appointment right away to get the temporary work permit. So, essentially we were still ass-out, but at least we would hopefully be able to get the temporary permit within a week.
So, I came home after work today, jumped on the BCIS website, and logged into my account to check the status of our cases. Lo and behold, my wife's work permit has been approved as of TODAY!! Coincindence? Hmmmmm... Well, the good news is that it's approved, but we still have to wait for it to show up in the mail, and the current permit expires today (I was mistaken on the expiration date initially.....way to go Sturgee!). So, maybe this thing processed like it was supposed to, but I have a suspicion that a phone call from the Senator's office caused something to happen. I mean...two days ago when I contacted BCIS, they told me that they were currently processing applications received by 14 October, and ours was submitted 1 November. So I'm supposed to believe that BCIS somehow processed ALL of the applications submitted between those two weeks, got to ours, and processed, and approved it....in 48 hours.... Not bloody likely.
Oh well, at least it's done now. Good for me, but the system is still broke. Maybe I should apply for a job as a supervisor at the agency so I can straighten some stuff out....yeah right, like that's gonna ever happen.