It was my first visit ever to a US Embassy. Since we had an appointment, getting inside was relatively easy. When we arrived, there were 2 LONG lines and we got to bypass both of them! (Sorry, people waiting) Our appointment was for 9:20. Our number was finally called at about 9:45. At that point, I had been nothing but impressed with how polite and helpful everyone had been that we had spoken with. I was expecting a "driver's license" sort of treatment. Well, up to that point....
When we located window 40, the guy behind the counter didn't care about our appointment letters or our numbers. Just my name and whether we were military. I told him we needed to get fingerprinted. He handed me 2 copies of the official form and said, "There ya go!". I told him that we actually needed them to do the fingerprints for us and he told me that they "didn't do that anymore". I told him that my form said they had to be the ones to do it and he insisted that they didn't do fingerprints. Repeat a couple more times as I got increasingly specific. I finally mentioned that the form was for adoption and he lit up. "Oh," he says, "adoption is the one thing we DO still do fingerprints for!" Aha!! So, we're getting somewhere. He gets up and leaves, I assume to get the ink pad and direct us to a place where he can actually reach our fingers without us removing them and sliding them through the tiny little slit below the window. Then the problems begin....
A lady comes and wants to confirm that we're wanting fingerprints for the I-600A. I tell her that we're getting fingerprints for the I-800A. (That dreaded "Hague" monster rearing its ugly head again!) She says they don't do that since they don't accept those applications there. I do a bit of a double-take. D asked her where we were supposed to get our fingerprints and she said that we had to have them done somewhere in the states. The instructions for the I-800A clearly say that we should get our fingerprints done HERE and I called and spoke to a stateside USCIS rep a few weeks ago who confirmed this AND told me we should get them done before we send in our application to avoid delays. This lady was now telling me that they didn't do them. Apparently, her boss had sent her an email "recently" that specifically said they are no longer to do fingerprints for I-800A forms. We had her call her boss and she was gone for a good 5-10 minutes, so it all seemed good. She came back with a copy of the instructions and we argued a bit about wording, at which point D said that we should just go. We both felt we were right, but the wording was not clearly on either of our sides. She was clinging to the paragraph that supported her view and I was clinging to the one that supported mine. Apparently, the phone call meant nothing to her either. So, we left without getting those precious fingerprints. A wasted morning that D had taken off work. :-(
The instructions say we can also get them done at a "US Military Installation", so we're going to talk to our friends to see if they can help us get onto the base and get fingerprinted there. At least now we have the forms, which is halfway there. We just need someone to take our prints who legally can. There is still hope that we can get them done before submitting our application, which I still think is our best bet for avoiding delays.
The most frustrating thing of this for me is that this is one of the steps that I expected to be easiest. This, and notarizing documents, which also turns out to be much more difficult over here, but that's another topic entirely. I guess crossing hurdles I knew would be there doesn't phase me much, but running into hurdles that I didn't see coming really discourages me. If we're having this much trouble just getting fingerprints, how much harder will it be to get our all-important approval? What about our visas?! I knew we were climbing an impossible mountain, but I had no idea how difficult it was going to be!
Here's a video that D emailed me after we got back that cheered me up a bit. This isn't quite what we ran into, but it's similar enough.
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