Hold Please

The British Consulate in the US doesn’t answer visa inquiries directly. Instead they have outsourced their phone support to a company called ABTRAN for $2.10 per minute. Unfortunately these people are only really set up to tell you if your visa has been issued. Any questions more complex than that (like it seems that the consulate has lost my passport, can you tell me where it is?) have to be routed back to the consulate.

Of course, ABTRAN can’t just transfer your call to the consulate, they have to take a message and forward that on to someone in the consulate who will then “call you back”. I put that in quotes because I’ve been told today, for the second time, that someone in the consulate will call me back. It didn’t happen yesterday, and I’m not holding a lot of hope that it will happen today.

The only difference from yesterday to today is that today I talked to a nice lady instead of the guy I talked to yesterday, and today she said she would mark the call back request as urgent since I had already delayed my flight once.

The other thing I have found through experience with ABTRAN is that they only have one song playing on their hold line. It plays an endless loop of Frank Sinatra singing Summer Wind