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[13:29] ...and visas for all!
We had our visa interview today and, despite much freaking out by me, it was all pretty easy, went well and we've been granted a lovely new E-3 visa!
The action all took place at the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embassy_of_the_United_States_in_London">American Embassy in London. Our appointment was for 0930 so we turned up bang on 0930 (the letter said not to rock up early because there's nowhere to stand around). We had to stand in a line in order to find out which line to queue in in order to gain entry so that was nice. Luckily we'd come prepared and had plenty of reading material and no liquids (or pocket-knives - although I admit that I protested bitterly about that on the way out the front door this morning). We eventually got into the building around 1015 after a reasonably perfunctory security check and presented our appointment letter for the third time to get into what looked very much like an airport waiting room. There are TV's hanging off the roof with counter numbers and the ticket number they're currently serving, a wee cafeteria (well, a refrigerated cabinet) and a LOT of seats. I also noticed that the fire extinguishers seemed to be from the US. I'd never seen anything like them before and I've no idea how you actually use them. A little searching this evening has identified them as RED LINE Cartridge-Operated Fire Extinguishers, they look very exciting!
We got called up for our initial check pretty quickly - around 1100. The automatic doodad called out our number (227) and we headed over to counter 11. A nice guy on the other side went through our documentation and made sure everything was in order and then asked us to present ourselves to the LS2 Check fingerprint scanner. This little gadget takes some pretty high-res (1584 x 1480 pixel) scans of your fingers: one of all four finges on each hand together and then both thumbs together. I asked the guy behind the window about the data retention policy but he just said that they'd keep them for "as long as necessary". So far I've not been able to find anything on the web except this from the US-VISIT Privacy Policy:
"Personal information collected by US-VISIT will be retained and destroyed in accordance with applicable legal and regulatory requirements."
I suspect that my prints and all of the information on the visa papers will be staying on file for quite some time. I guess I better make sure that I remain innocent so that I've nothing to fear....(hopefully the definition of innocent will remain the same).
After that excitement we sat around until about 1300. Luckily I had an almost unread MAKE Magazine which kept me happily occupied. When we got called around to the second set of windows and a nice guy asked us a few questions to make sure we hadn't told any lies, scanned our fingers again (I assume to make sure we'd not done a quick switcheroo in the waiting room) and sent us on our way!
[Posted at: 22/08/2006 21:29]