Something is moving FAST!
A lot of things happened in the last few days, all of them POTENTIALLY DISASTROUS were it not for our perseverance and paranoia. After we received Serse’s birth certificate last week, a couple of routes were open to us and, unlike visual novel games, it was not only possible but absolutely advisable to follow them in parallel. As I already mentioned, one thing life taught me is that it is always better to call and talk with humans at the phone. Because emails get ignored, because websites contain obsolete, wrong, or cursed information, and because nobody will ever call YOU first. Read on and I’ll show you what I mean.
First of all an update: after my second solicitation with a big [URGENT] tag, somebody at the Italian Consulate in Zerneve finally replied to my email about the procedure for requesting Serse’s passport. They write that, first thing, I have to send them the original of the birth certificate per post.
AYFKM? Do you think I’m going to send you THE ORIGINAL of the birth certificate that took my own life to obtain? The same ORIGINAL birth certificate that I will probably need VERY SOON for the request of the residence permit at the Kreisbüro? No fucking way, and anyway this is not what the Zivilsthing office told me (they said they would communicate the birth certificate directly to the Consulate). Clearly something is wrong with the email response. So, better take things on my own hands.
Two days ago I started first by calling the Kreisbüro of our district to get updates on the process of the residence permit for Serse.
“Hello, I am Mario Fantasia, Italian citizen resident in Zerneve. I wanted to know if you got notified of the birth of our son Serse, because we have to come and register him at your office to request the residence card.”
“No, I’m sorry, it seems like there is only you and your daughter Penelope in our system. If you received the birth certificate only recently there is certainly to wait, maybe 2-3 weeks.” (…me adding mentally an extra week due to Easter holidays, sigh…)
“Ehm, OK… So… do we have to come to your office or do we have to wait? This is getting pretty urgent, it’s been 4 months now…”
“No, you have to wait our letter to invite you here with the baby. Then you have to wait for the Immigration Office to invite you for the ritual photo. Wait, what is the mother’s name?”
“Mei-Lin Feng”
“Ah, wait, here it is! Your son Serse was registered under your wife’s name, that’s why I couldn’t see it! So, yes, it’s already here, you should receive the invitation letter from us very soon.”
Notice: the mistake is probably due to the fact that in the good old patriarchal Switzerland it is considered weird for a woman to not adopt her husband’s last name after marriage, but Mei-Lin and I follow the Italian tradition of keeping our surnames as original. And, regardless, AYFKM? So what, if I hadn’t called you we would have wasted 2-3 weeks before someone at your office realized that something was wrong? Anyway, “Good, so we should receive the letter soon?”
“Yes, but keep in mind there’s Easter holidays, so be patient”. Sigh…
OK, nothing more to do here. Let’s move to the more interesting part: The Italian Consulate in Zerneve, which we are going to call here “The Asylum”.
There are many things you should know about The Asylum, and many things you should forget as well. Two of the things you should know are:
- Nobody walks-in at the Asylum without invitation, because COVID-19 restrictions are forever.
- The Asylum only answers phone calls one hour per day, between 12:00 and 13:00 from Monday to Friday.
I need to make sure that Serse is registered to the AIRE (the state registry of Italians residents abroad). Different offices at the Asylum have different phone numbers, and there is no central call center or even online waiting queue system. Every office has an autoresponder which always, except during the non-holy hour, tells you (in Italian only) something like “Pape Satàn, pape Satàn aleppe This office only answers calls between 12:00 and 13:00“. Another thing to know is that the Asylum’s website is slow as f**k, probably it is hosted in some datacenter in Molise, so navigating it to find the right number takes forever.
I start calling at 11:59. Frantically, every few seconds. 12:00: still autoresponder. 12:01: still autoresponder. 12:02: line busy.
A Y F K M. How many other cursed souls have to cross your telephonic Hades? Did I not bribe Charon enough? Oh, the Doom!
But wait, there is something wrong here. I call again, and there is again the autoresponder! I call again: busy. I call again: autoresponder. And so on…
After 29 attempts, at 12:05 finally a human voice picks up.
“Hello, this is the AIRE office at The Asylum”
“Ah, thank goodness! My name is blahblah, I need to request a passport for my newborn son Serse, but I guess we have to register him to the AIRE first. You answered my email and told me you need me to send you the original of the birth certificate, but this is… undesirable for us. Can you confirm?”
“Let me check… What is the name again? Ah yes, here he is. No problem, we already have the birth certificate, you don’t need to send us anything, the AIRE enrollment will be done automatically in a few days. In the meantime you can even start the application for the passport.”
This is… too much emotion for me. I don’t know how to feel.
Clearly now I have to call ANOTHER number, the Asylum’s Passport Office, but it’s gonna be impossible to get through at this time. So I wait the day after, and again at 11:59 I start calling every second. After 24 attempts I manage to get through.
“Hello, I’m Mario Fantasia blahblah. If I scroll through your website, at the PASSPORTS section, a couple of things are not clear to me. First of all, you ask to authenticate a photo of the child AND the signature of an Extra-EU parent, where can we do this?”
“Well, you can do it… I don’t know exactly where, but there is another option: you could come here directly in person (with mom and baby) when the passport is ready, so we do the authentication here directly, and you do not need to include the pre-stamped envelope for the shipping of the passport if that’s more convenient for you, we call you when it’s ready.”
Well, this sounds a bit ridiculous, but it’s actually more convenient for us. Good.
“OK, great. Another question. Also on your website it says that we need to send you per post the application form, etc, PLUS copies of a valid ID of the baby, and the Swiss residence permit. But we do not have all these things.”
And here i was SWEATING. I was afraid that the answer would be “OK, first get the residence permit”. But no:
“Oh, in that case never mind. Just put a copy of anything that shows your residence address, like a utility bill or a copy of your health insurance contract.”
Again, I’m not sure how I should feel… LUCKILY I CALLED YOU.
OK, here we are. I prepare all the requested documents and I put them in an envelope. I also add an “addendum” where I recap in plain Italian the situation, for the benefit of the poor soul who’s gonna open the envelope. OF COURSE I CAN ONLY SEND IT NEXT TUESDAY BECAUSE OF FRICKIN’ EASTER HOLIDAYS. In the meantime I have also received an email from the Comune of Spelunca to confirm that Serse was successfully registered to the AIRE. I only need to download the passport request form from the Asylum’s website, fill it and include it to the mail.
The link is broken.
And here, ladies and gentlemen, I kindly ask you: How do people without a deep knowledge in tech manage this? After some investigation, I realized it was a DNS CONFIGURATION ERROR OF THE ASYLUM’S WEBSITE. The address https://zerneve.esteri.it redirects successfully, but the address https://www.zerneve.esteri.it does not. And somebody left the link to the form with the www in front. So, I manually remove the www et voilà: I have the form.
All is now ready to be sent per post next Tuesday, Stay tuned!
Are You Fucking Kidding Me 