Loyal readers may remember that in January, I returned to Russia with a new passport -- the old one had expired -- without bothering to change my visa, and was denied entry to the country.
Now of course my schools position on this was that it was my fault; that I was responsible for making sure all my papers were in order.
This is true; but only because I should never have been stupid enough to think that the girl who receives a salary to check on such shit would have bothered to do so. She had told me the passport was about to expire; I assumed this meant I should change it.
They of course denied that.
In an email from the owner of the company: "All you needed to do was bring your old passport with you. You would have been given entry and then you could easily have switched the visa within Russia."
Now of course nobody bothered to tell me that before I left, but I did have to agree, in retrospect, that I could have been more prepared.
So anyway, to the punchline: Another teacher went back to America and got his passport renewed, and came back to Russia two days ago with the both his new passport, old passport and old visa, since now of course the school knows exactly what to expect. . .
. . . and was denied entry. It is impossible to enter the country with two passports, he was told by customs. So he gets to spend some expensive stressful days in Frankfurt sorting it out.
My god, what a crackerjack organization I'm working for. They couldn't organize a gang rape.
Second punchline: naturally, I had to go in to fill in for the guy's nine a.m class yesterday. And then none of the students showed up, as he'd apparently told them he was taking a holiday and they just assumed the class was cancelled. (I was so relieved that I got to go home and go back to sleep after 30 minutes that I couldn't even get too angry about that.)
4 comments:
So have they accepted that the email you received from God was not, in fact, correct. Did they reimburse you for the little holiday in Frankfurt?? How long exactly have you worked for them now steve ???
You are a fucking genius
Too fucking long, is how long. Like a piece of string.
It was certainly instrumental in my decision to relocate, I should say.
Well at least they didn't beat you up at the airport and charge you 200 bucks for the privilege. I heard that this happened to some guy who showed up somewhere in Russia claiming that his visa and passport were valid, when in fact they had both expired.
He put up a big show of force, assuming that he'd face them off with some sort of "I'm an important Westerner" crap, and got a pasting for his troubles. I told him that he could have saved himself the bruises by coughing up a little Western dengi, but he appeared to be working to a strict budget. Shame it didn't stretch to a little 'education', though, eh?!
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