A trip to Immigration

[snotface]

Mid-March is my retirement visa renewal time and I always like to get it out of the way late-February. Get bad or boring stuff done asap, that's me. I duly presented myself at my bank on the dot of 9.30 this morning to obtain the letter signifying that I have 800,000B in my account, the one time in the year when it earns its keep. On to Jomtien Immigration at 10.00am. People milling about outside and a new queue there to deal with overflow. Quite a confusing scene even for an old hand like me, goodness knows what first-timers make of it.

First stop the building adjacent to Immigration, which gets busier every year. It now handles, in addition to its other office functions, visa applications by Lao, Cambodian and Burmese citizens (yes, there are some who bother). Inside I was relieved to see the benign figure of dear old Barry Kenyon, who has long helped out at Immigration on meagre remuneration. He got all my paperwork photocopied and organised for me with his usual efficiency.

Then into the main building to join one of two queues at the Information desk. Inevitably I chose the slow one. A stroppy Russian lady was testing the patience of one of the Thai girls behind the desk. I got my ticket at last and joined the melee in the large room beyond. The usual purgatorial scene - people frowning, people tight-lipped, people with swivelling, silently pleading eyes (can YOU help me please, please?), people looking just plain bored and resigned. To my amazement I had no more than a ten minute wait to be served at Desk 8. In that time I registered the absence of that stocky, moon-faced, bespectacled Thai who seems to have worked in that section forever. In the old days he was one of the humble drudges processing visa renewals on the front line. In recent years he acquired a more supervisory role, consisting of nodding or muttering a few words when juniors brought documents to him and sitting there snacking the rest of the time. I don't think he's ever been absent on one of my visits before. I kind of missed him. Perhaps he's graduated to his dream role of lounging out back in a hammock all day, launching the occasional paper aeroplane made from that useless, ever-accumulating mountain of paperwork.

At the desk my application went without a hitch. I paid the 1900B fee (such a strange amount - is it meant to suggest that we're getting some kind of bargain?), took my ticket for tomorrow's passport collection and left, feeling the usual waves of relief. The time a brisk 10.45am. No reference, by the way, to having to return in three months' time to verify that I've not been dipping into the precious 800,000B. That bright idea seems now to have gone the way of many bright ideas before it into bureaucratic oblivion.

I walked the few yards to Jomtien Second Road, which is doing its best to match the chaos within Immigration. Both lanes of the dual carriageway have been reduced to single lanes so that re-laying can begin (when? I wonder). Red-and-white tape and concrete blocks all over the place. Long lines of traffic. Crossing the road can now be a bit of a nightmare (Smiles might have a tale to tell about that if he reads this). I made it across eventually, bought flowers and delicious seedless red grapes in the market, and headed back to my condo with a pleasing sense of having had a more than usually productive morning.

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