I got to the embassy 30 minutes earlier than my appointment time but there was already a queue waiting for me. All things considered, it was a fairly anticlimatic experience; a 40-minute wait in a queue followed by a 20 minute wait to have my fingerprints taken, concluding with an uneventful interview. I was told my passport would be ready to be picked up the next day.

I met Oro for lunch after finishing up at the embassy, and had what I can only describe as a fun afternoon. After lunch he took me by train to an arcade located in the suburbs, where I finally got to play King of Fighters ’98 Ultimate Match. Needless to say, I really liked it. I got my ass kicked a whole bunch (mostly by a pretty good O.Yashiro/Rugal/EX Yamazaki player), but it was fun. It’s been ages since I stepped into a real arcade (2006 was the last time I stepped into Einstein’s in Austin), and it was awesome.

They also had a couple of Street Fighter IV cabs, and rather amusingly a Sengoku Basara X cab (which was naturally deserted). I didn’t try either of them, but SF4 looks pretty smooth in motion.

Tomorrow I hope to do a bit of sightseeing before picking up my passport. I wonder if the pub downstairs will be having an election night special or something…

(Oh, and the post title? I’m typing this from my old (circa 2004) laptop whose native res is 1024×768…the lowest resolution in which my blog is even readable)

I’ve heard horror stories of people who get stuck for weeks waiting for their passport to be returned to them…I have my fingers crossed that my interview goes smoothly.

This has pretty much been the only thing on my mind for the last month or so.

Otherwise, not much else is going on. Playing TF2 every night with Perfect Stranger and his friends, going to work as usual and otherwise pretending that my continued legal status in this country is not down to the decision of one guy in a building in Vancouver.

Just thought you would like to know.

This means that I won't have to travel anywhere this year, although I may have to next year depending on how things work out with my H-1B application. Still, it's one less thing to worry about.

Just for some perspective, there are 65,000 H-1B visas given out every year to foreigners who want to work in the United states. The actual number of applicants is something like ten times that number, so what USCIS ends up doing is running the applicants through a lottery and picking 65,000 names at random.

Yes, whether or not I get to stay in this country will depend on some programmer's implementation of int rand(). You can probably imagine what I think of this process, so I won't vocalise it.

If I fail to get it with this filing, I can only apply next April…and my existing visa expires on July 9th, meaning I'll have to leave the country. I'll have to do this even if I get the visa (since it only takes effect on October 1st) but in the event of a longer delay I'll have to look at the possibility of moving to another Amazon location. Truth be told, the prospect of having to uproot myself from a fairly comfortable existence isn't really doing much for my peace of mind at the moment. It was easy enough to push to the back of my mind when the date was months away, but now it's pretty much all I'm thinking about.

Maybe I'll try to drown it out with caffeine tomorrow morning.