Three act drama

There was no Goblin POst yesterday because I had to take the afternoon off to go and get my visa application finished. And what a three-act-drama that turned into. I picked up the passport I surrendered last week as planned and the visa has been added, so far so good. So it's off to the police authority building to update my alien resident certificate and get a re-entry permit. The first problem was lack of family register document. This was because I had to surender it to the foreign affairs authority last week. One has to be registered at an address to qualify for a visa under these circumstances. Then I was informed that I was actuately at the wrong police authority building. This seemed strange to me because I used this one for previous applications. However, since I moved, I now have to go to another one, further away.

So I had to go back to Hsin Dian, get the family register document. I then had to flag down a taxi and head out to Banciao. It was gone 4 pm by then and the police place at Banciao only stays open until 5. On route to Banchaio it transpired that I didn't have any photos. God knows where they went, must have left them in the other police building. So the Dragon suggested that we remove the photo from the health check statement which was required for the visa application, and use that. We surrepticiously asked first whether we would be needing that document again before we peeled off the photo, and it appeared we didn't. I was slightly concerned that the health authority stamp over my picture would mean instance rejection, but we were lucky. The operative cropped the picture nicely, thereby removing all but a small trace of the stamp. From there on it was plain sailing. I got all my stamps and visas. I can stay another year even if I lose my job. Well actually there is still one thang that can go wrong. I haven't actually got an alien resident certificate yet, they're mailing it to me, so it could yet get lost.

I mentioned a while back about an employee of the Driver Vehicle Licencing Authority who was in trouble after she sent a colleague a video of herslef having sex using a mobile phone. I said at the time that I couldn't se why this had anything to do with her employer. She has now been sacked from her job for "gross misconduct". I still can't understand how that can be. She's considering legal action. I'm interested to see how this goes. Click.

Tomorrow is Harry Potter launch day and I'm still hoping the Dragon has arranged something for my birthday, which is 9 days later. A school in Lincolnshire was going to have a HP day and the kids were going to dress as Witches and wizards, but the local comunity idiots, fronted by the rector it seems, have managed to put a stop to that in case the kids all start practicing the dark arts and dabbling in the occult. Well you can't be too careful can you? Click.

One more thing to mention today, a new study seems to show that the power of healing prayer is ineffective. The report is published int he Lancet and involved 700 patients. Its an interesting read, Click.