The Theory of Blogtivity: last minute, clumsy, careless

Today was bitterly cold, and today hasn't been my day. Not at all.

My student visa will expire on 31 Dec this year. Means in 30 days. Applying for a visa extension here in the UK is something that you won't fancy doing. Nobody would, I think. It consumes your time and your money,also cause you hassles and headache.

Two of the very important documents that I need for the application are the financial affidavit from my sponsor (KPT) which has been posted to me last Friday by KPT but has not arrived ever since, and also ATAS (Academic Approval Technology Scheme) clearance certificate, that I have to apply first by completing the ATAS form, which I have, and then need to be submitted, which I did today. Mind you, it takes up to 4 weeks in order to be granted this ATAS crap. (I heard some people got it within 2 weeks, so I desperately hope that I got mine in not more than 2 weeks too).

Now that I have submitted the ATAS application form, I thought it is a relief as I now just have to wait for the certificate before then I could proceed to submitting my visa application. Unfortunately it was not as easy as I thought it would be. Few hours back, when talking with my housemate (Kak Shidah) only then I realised that I did two mistakes in filling up the form.

First, there was a section asking for my previous granted ATAS certificate and the question where I did wrong was "The date you applied for your previous ATAS certificate". Then I thought, what the heck is this question? Why not just ask for the date the certificate was given instead of the date I applied? So with all the confusion, I went through my old emails, and found these few emails about this ATAS business. I couldn't find any email that I sent for the purpose of applying ATAS. So stupidly, I made a guess. Yes, a guess. So I checked the certificate, then I thought, it must had been few days before I got the certificate. And so it went with the 'brilliantly' guessed date.

Then the second mistake was of the "Referees" part. It needs two referees and I put both my supervisors here as referees without any idea that one of the referees has to be from the country of origin, ie Malaysia. So the form was submitted with these two stupid mistakes and there's no way that I could correct any of them.

To make things worse, the last date that I could submit my visa application through the university International Office is 15th Dec, and the International Office will open again at 4th January 2011 (dorg ni xmas mmg sakan, sama la mcm org Malaysia beraya) which means if I am refused the ATAS clearance certificate, I will have no time at all to apply a new one, hence there's a big potential of being refused the visa as well due to not providing complete supporting documents along with visa application form. And if I fail in the visa application, I have to apply another one which I am not happy to do because each application cost me 360 pound sterling (RM 1800).

Double pats on your shoulder, dear Zaifa. What a super excellent job you have done.

And the PhD has also got its way. Too many things to do with too little time. Research sometimes excites me though. Finding new things does cheer me up every time, and quite often too, I have a moment of "yeah I think I'm a genius" (haha :p ) But then, you know, the more you find, the more clueluess you become, hence the need to dig in more and more. The problem is, when do you stop digging? If you stop now, you will not know more., if you never stop, then your PhD will never end.

There have been seven emails from Bob since yesterday. And I have replied none. Seven emails, each about different things (papers, experiments, comments bla bla bla). Now with all this messed up visa stuff, then with my supervisor's emails, I am tensed. Really really tensed.

Today hasn't been my day. But thanks for being there...