An F1 visa... Part Two

In desperation, I mailed a friend of mine, Arpith Jacob who was in the same position. A talented programmer, he had written a script to scan the appointment website every few minutes and SMS him whenever a date became free because someone cancelled an appointment. Using it, he moved his date from mid-July to June 1st. As my mobile phone wasn't working, he modified it to send me an e-mail.

So there I was, signed into MSN messenger and waiting for the 'you have received a new email from...' pop-up. I got lucky; there was a cancellation in an hour. Unfortunately, by the time I logged in to the site and selected "modify", the slot was gone. I decided I could shave a few seconds off my reaction time, so I opened a web page to the 'modify/cancel' login screen, typed in my id and password, and waited. Sure enough, in half an hour the script mailed me again. In less than half a second, I've pressed enter and logged in. Again, someone was there before me. I sat at the computer all afternoon, watching this happen 6 times. Finally, I was lucky enough to be the first person... but the slot I got was still in mid-July, not quite early enough. Eventually, late that night, a slot came free on June 21st, and I swooped in first. An interesting experience, but one that can't have done me any good, especially with a family history of hypertension.

Veterans of the visa ordeal tell me that this was the easy part. The nightmare of the interview is still ahead of me. Last year, a friend of mine called Jacob Thomas was suspected of being an 'Islamic terrorist' and had to defer his admission until the FBI cleared him! I suspect that by August, I'll be able to add to the fund of horror stories.