On Wednesday, I planned a trip to New York City to take documents to the Guatemala Consulate. I was told that doing this in person improves service and you get the assurance that these important documents find the right place at the consulate. I got a babysitter for John for after school and my Mom came to help me with Ian on the trip and off we went.
The trip went amazingly smoothly. We left at 6:30 am (pulled Ian from his bed at 6:20), caught the 8:12 am train out of New Haven and arrived at Grand Central Station at 10:15 am. Although we did get really turned around when we walked out of the station, and ended up spending $7.00 on taxi that took us 3 blocks from where we started (after doing a tour of Park Ave) we arrived at the Consulate and almost immediately were directed to Mrs. Mishaun. Mrs. Mishaun went through my documents, took my money and assured us that they would be authenticated and express mailed back within 24-36 hours. We were done by 11am, had a yummy lunch at a nice deli and caught the 12:12 train back home. Ian enjoyed the train and the BIG city and we were home by 3:30. What a success!
So, with great anticipation I waited for the mailman on Friday. No package :(....but Saturday it arrived. All 14 documents were approved and in order. Then I started pulling together the additional 6-8 documents that were required to send my COMPLETED dossier to our agency. In a brief, heart stopping moment, I realized that I was supposed to have had 4 other documents authenticated by the Consulate!! Because these four were not required to be authenticated by the Connecticut Secretary of State, I had overlooked the need to include them in our packet to the Consulate. All of my checklists had this step on it, but I was going from memory, thinking that I knew it by heart. After the nausea passed, I drafted a new cover letter and return mailer and raced off to express mail these four documents to the Consulate in hopes that they would process them on Monday morning and then send them directly to our agency. After learning that the ONLY FedEx drop still open was at the airport....off I went!
I relaxed a little knowing that my goof had only cost us a couple of days. Then came today....I call the Guatemala Consulate, talk to Mrs. Mishaun who received my FedEx only to learn that because our marriage and Rick's birth certificate were issued in California counties, that those two documents needed to be authenticated by the California Consulate for Guatemala!! This was a detail that I had not uncovered in all of my reading and research on dossier preparation. (I opted not to pay our agency to do our dossier to save $2,500). THANKFULLY, I had another certified set of these two documents at our agency and they agreed to FedEx the documents to California this afternoon. But, with Veterens Day this Friday, I am afraid that our agency will not have all of our documents back in hand until early next week. I am HOPING for Monday. All in all, I've lost a week and probably $80 in express mail fees. The good news is that other than a couple minor revisions, the rest of our dossier looked great, according to our agency. I'm going to try and cut myself some slack since even with an additional week, our dossier looks like it will be ready to go to Guatemala 3 weeks from the day we signed with our agency. Not bad in reality. It is just frustrating to work so hard and to still make mistakes that keep Franklin from us for longer.
