From a Whisper to a Scream

The day started out normal enough – or, more accurately, as normal as you can get on a day when the scheduled activities included gorging myself on Party Down reruns and pretending we haven’t noticed how greasy the students have gotten after spending three days sleeping on the floor of the classrooms – but it ended with three Americans who now have a record in Thailand.  A criminal record.  Yeah, you know that awkward moment when you almost get deported?  That happened today.

This one has Stacy's name on it, but we all got
matching reports from the "Royal Thai Police"

We have been waiting for over two weeks for the paperwork to be processed for our Thai work permits.  This is something the school is responsible for getting done and which should have been completed about a month after we arrived.  But like I’ve said before, this is Thailand, and nothing gets done in a timely fashion here.  Also on our plates was the visa extension we needed to stay in the country.  The visa we got before we left North America is called a Non-Immigrant B Visa, and is a working visa good for 90 days from the date we arrived in the country, which for us was October 21.  Because we’ve been deluged with more information than the human brain can process, and because nothing here is ever explained fully, we were under the (false) impression that we needed to be in possession of the work permit in order to get the visa extension.  Logically, this makes sense because how else could you get an extension on a working visa without proof (work permit) that you are actually working in Thailand.  Turns out all the proof we needed was a document from the school, but we found this out too late.  We couldn't understand why they kept telling us to go get our visa extensions before the work permit was in, and they wouldn't explain what was going on, so we figured we needed to wait and do both at once.  This was wrong.  We had also been told that we had a seven-day window on either side of the 90 days in which we could get the extension.  If we failed to report after the 97^th day, we would be charged a 2000 THB charge.  This was also wrong.  It obviously comes down to the simple fact that we should have either been paying more attention or double-checking things we thought to be true – really this was our fault and could have been avoided had we been more diligent.  It would have been nice, however, if the school had been more on the ball and helped us sort through the quagmire of paperwork.

Original visa

Today we got a call from one of the teachers while were sitting in the English department moaning about whatever it is that’s going on with the United States Congress that is preventing all our favorite illegal downloading sites from illegally downloading our shows.  The teacher told us that our work permits were in, and we could leave school and pick them up.  We got a van from Aoluk to drop us off right at the Labor Office where we picked up our new work permits no sweat.  Then we walked from there to the immigration office to get the visa extension.  It was at about this moment when the shit hit the fan.

There were three people in the office dealing with us:  A man we later realized was a police sergeant (this was a police matter, yo!), a young-ish woman and a middle-aged woman who from the get-go was nothing but nasty to us.  Then she saw the stamp on our passports that said our visa expired on January 18.  “You overstay two days!” she kept yelling.  “Visa until 18.  Now it 20!  You pay fine!”  I was the first of the three of us to sit with her to get the extension and you all know that having me sit there while this lady spits in my face was a bad idea:  You yell at me, I will yell back at you.  I raised my voice to match the decibel level of hers and pointed out that we had seven days after the expiration to get the extension.  She wouldn’t let me speak and just kept yelling at me in incomprehensible English.  That’s the thing about Thais – they don’t let you speak your piece.  They say what they want and then while you are trying to talk they either talk over you, ignore you, or flat-out walk away.  It’s one of the single most frustrating things I’ve ever experienced.  This lady was of the “I won’t listen to what you have to say, and I will just keep repeating myself as if acting like a damn broken record will make you shut up” camp.  Steam started pouring from my ears and Stacy and Carlyn stepped up to argue with me.  We kept mentioning the seven-day grace period and she just kept saying “overstay!” 

Thai work permit.  We got those photos taken
here, and they Photoshopped us to within
an inch of our lives: Lightened our skin
(as theyare wont to do), darkened our
eyebrows and added more eyeliner.  We look
like creepy porcelain dolls.

This went on far longer than it should have before we finally called our coordinator who literally did nothing but say that the school will reimburse us for the fine – and let’s face it, this school says a lot of things.  They’re a whole lotta talk with zero follow-through, so if we actually do get reimbursed, I’ll have to place a call to the Pope, because it’ll be a genuine miracle.  When we saw we were still getting nowhere, we called our OEG director, hoping he could sort out the mess like he did with the housing mess earlier in the semester (he’s probably getting sick of us). 

Turns out, the “seven-day window” was actually not for the visa extension, but rather for “checking in” with immigration.  I still don’t understand this.  When would we ever have to check in with immigration if we weren’t getting the visa extension?  These are the types of things that need clarification…..in writing….in big, bold, black letters…more than once….and NOT when we’ve been in the country for four days and are overcome with paralyzing anxiety and jet lag.  We have been given so much confusing information that I feel like I’m living in a Tarantino movie.

We did end up having to pay the fine and the extension fee which was a pain, BUT it turns out that if the people had been in a bad mood, they could have just deported us right then and there so we can be thankful that didn’t happen.  If that lady wasn’t in a bad mood, I would hate to see what a bad mood actually looks like on her.  I imagine such a mood would come standard with its own flying monkeys.  We also had to sign what appeared to be an official police report.  In America, I’ve got a couple speeding tickets and a few dozen unpaid parking tickets from the John Carroll Campus Security (Ha! I knew I could get away with that!), but in Thailand, I’m a freaking felon….I might not actually be a felon, but it sounds more badass to say it that way, so we’ll stick with felon.

Top half is the visa extension.  Bottom half
tells all concerned that we violated our
visa....future implications?  Who knows.

To further complicate matters, they can only extend our visa according to what the document from the school says our contract is until, which for us is February 28.  We finish teaching on that date, but Carlyn and I don’t leave until the end of March, and Stacy is here through mid-April, so that date was next to useless.  Probably what the school is supposed to do is lie and say that we are “employed” through whenever our return flight is so that the visa extension actually makes sense.  This didn’t happen for a few reasons.  1) Because it seems our school was actually quite impressively unprepared for farang teachers and all the paperwork such an undertaking entails, 2) Because they never double-check anything, and 3) Because they inexplicably lumped all the paperwork for the work permit and the visa extension together when really they were two completely separate issues.  This is a serious problem because this means our visa is only valid until February 28.  What we’ll try to do is get the school to write another letter saying we’re here until April 1 so that we can get yet another extension (which, we will NOT be paying for thankyouverymuch).  If that doesn’t happen, which let’s face it, in the land of Murphy’s Law, it won’t, then we do have to make a border-run to Malaysia to get a tourist visa before our current ones expire.  I believe these are only good for seventeen days which would mean that we would have to do it again smack in the middle of March during our much-anticipated, all-we-live-for-these-days travel time.

So we survived and haven’t been deported and we aren’t sitting in some sort of immigrant jail, so I guess we escaped the day relatively unscathed.  We avoided what could have been a three-way meltdown of epic-proportions had we not quickly found a ride home when two motorcycle taxis magically pulled into the immigration office as we were walking out.  It’s like the universe sensed we were on the verge of punching a cat in the face and intervened to save the cat.