Temporary lull in the visa storm

It was getting to be quite touch and go for a while whether I’d manage to make it back out to the US for Pat and Emilie’s wedding (on the weekend of the 22nd August) and Burning Man after it.

Luckily, just as I was about to abandon all hope, two things happened. Firstly, Beth – our neighbour at Burning Man last year – suggested I try to get a second passport as my original was basically “stolen” by the US embassy. I was impressed that the IPS is enlightened enough to allow frequent travelers to easily get a second passport for just this purpose – a lovely change from the glacial pace of other bureaucracies.

Secondly, I got a response from the US embassy about the fate of my original passport. Because the visas we’re going for are quite unusual, I’m relatively young and don’t have a Nobel Prize, they’re checking with the USCIS that they really did mean to approve my application. My lawyer says that in every case this has happened to his clients before, it’s been a simple confirmation from the US, and the embassy grant the visa with no drama. So, it’s good news that this situation has come up before, it’s good news that it’s always ended happily before and it’s good news that they’re not doing a time-consuming full review. It’s even better news that in the meantime they’ve couriered my passport straight back to me; I didn’t even need to get a second one in the end!

So, the plan is to fly back to San Francisco on Monday, across to Connecticut for the wedding, then back to San Francisco to get ready for our desert adventure at the end of August.

Yosemite trip

Just before flying back to England, some friends and I made a trip to Yosemite for the weekend. We headed out there after work on Friday, setting off at around 7pm with the car full of enormous sandwiches, bourbon and sleeping bags.

The 200 mile drive took about 4 and a half hours, including a couple of stops, so we arrived pretty late, just wanting to set ourselves up and get some sleep ready for the big day to follow. However, before we could do that, we had to empty all food and smelly stuff from the car, or face a $5000 fine for tempting bears into camp; there was a special bear proof locker outside all the tents into which we threw the aforementioned monolithic sandwiches, chocolate and toiletries.

After a few hours sleep, we woke up at about 6:30am, to be met by this view:

Note the angle of the trees – I was craning right back just to get that cliff in the viewfinder… And that started a day of incomprehensible scales and impossible vistas.

The plan was to hike up Half Dome, a mountain nearly 9,000 ft high. Although the campsite was already roughly as high above sea level as the tallest mountain in Britain, we still had a 5,000ft climb up to the summit. To make this clearer, if Robert Wadlow, world’s tallest human, was as big as Half Dome, we would have been camping near his crotch, while Ben Nevis would be up to his belt. Meanwhile, the Eiffel Tower would be halfway up Wadlow’s shin, or at the shoulder of Gul Mohammed; world’s smallest man. Basically, although we were starting high, there was still a long way to go.

After bagels and cream cheese for breakfast, we set off. I was carrying 5 litres of water, a sandwich the size of the Indian subcontinent, a few Snickers bars, a hat, a jumper, waterproof hat and waterproof trousers, as “the weather can turn quickly at high altitudes”.

I quickly came to realise that I’d made a grave error. As we moved up out of the valley on the Misty Trail, and into the sunlight, it became obvious that it was going to be a scorching day, and that I had about 10kg of useless on my back. Undeterred, we pressed on up and to the side of Vernal Fall.

By this point, things were getting a bit warm, so the blast of misted snow melt from this waterfall was very welcome!

From Vernal Fall, it was on and up to Nevada Fall; an enormous waterfall onto slanting rock. 20 feet before the fall itself, the river looks completely innocuous and harmless – quite a transformation!

By the time we reached the top of Nevada Fall, it was around 10:30am, and we were roughly halfway to the summit. The next hour or so was gentle enough climbing up through pine forests, with the imposing bulk of Half Dome itself appearing to our left.

At about 11:30am, due to a few too many Snickers and energy bars, and burgeoning sunstroke, I thought it would be a great idea to run the rest of the ascent, so off I shot, aiming to get to the summit for lunch. This actually went better than could be expected, and although I was basically dying, I did manage to catch up with the leaders of our expedition (who had continued while we were messing about at Nevada Fall).

As we neared the final ascent – the side of the dome itself – we could see a little line of ants on the side of the huge lump of granite; ants that gradually turned into tourists from Nebraska.

Now, I’ve never had to queue for a mountain before. And although in principle I’m a big fan of The Great Outdoors being popular enough for there to be congestion here and there, the fact that you were expected to wait for an hour and a half before starting the final ascent was a bit strange to me…

Still, I sat and took an inconsequential feast from a sandwich the size of Michael Jackson’s remembrance book, and waited for everyone to catch up. By now, it was really hot. We were way above the treeline, so there was no shade, and the white granite was bouncing back the intense sun from all angles.

The final pull up to the summit was very steep bare rock – maybe a 55° slope – so a pair of metal cables have been run to the top, the idea being that you pull yourself up to the top between the cables. It was this “between the cables” bottleneck causing the queue, so we decided to go up the outside of the pair, using just the one cable and bypassing the delay.

The summit was barren and indescribably hot. Hot, hot, hot. We heard afterwards that it was 110°F.

The views from the top were amazing; the globular granite mountains seemed so extra-terrestrial to me. But it was the sheer 1,500ft drop off the front of the dome that was most striking.

After an hour or so mincing and recovering on top, we started down the mountain. The descent proceeded without incident, stopping only to refill water (making it 7 litres that day, in total), and get a couple of pics of Half Dome with Nevada Falls in the foreground.

Visa saga part 3: tax records special!

My trip to the US Embassy was quite an experience.

The debacle really started while organising a time to go to the embassy and get the O-1 visa processed. Visa petitioners have to make a pre-arranged appointment (so far, so gravy), these appointments can only occur at 8am (inconvenient, but acceptable), and the appointment “hot-line” costs £1.20 per minute. One pound twenty per minute!? I was living on that much per day in Nicaragua.

On top of that, the ludicrously expensive phone call culminates in you authorising them to take a further $131 as a Machine Readable Visa fee, whatever that is. What are they doing which costs $131? Doesn’t machine-readable just mean a barcode? Specially formatted text, like we have on passports? An RFID tag at a push?

Onto the actual appointment itself. One of the warnings included in the appointment confirmation is that you are required to wait outside “even in inclement weather”, so I was quite pleased to find it a clement, if nippy, morning in Grosvenor Square.

Other warnings include the restrictions on electronics in the embassy: no mobile phones, laptops; even USB sticks are verboten. After enjoying my traditional English queue, the security drone’s eyes lit up when I produced a few coins and a pair of headphones from my pocket before going through the metal detector.

“You can’t take those into the embassy, sir”, he japed. “Ha ha, good show”, I chortled heartily. Unfortunately, the steely, lifeless eyes framed in his frozen, mirthless visage made it all too clear that he was actually serious. The headphones posed a threat to national security.

“Those could be used as a transmitting device”, he asserted with a mind-bending mix of inaccuracy and self-assurance. Not wishing to get down to the brass tacks of just how egregiously incorrect he was, I conceded defeat, and paid £5 (five sterling) to store the headphones in a plastic bag for an hour.

Security checkpoint cleared, I was in the building. After a modest wait, I was called for an interview with a chap from Texas. He seemed perfectly happy with all the O-1 visa stuff; perfectly happy until it came to tax records. As I’d spent a few months in the US last year, paid for in part by my company, it now appears that full tax records for me and the company are required reading for some lucky State Department employee.

Unfortunately, I don’t think we really have any tax records… We haven’t paid anyone any money, and I haven’t been paid any money, so there are no IRS filings. We have an ID for the company and an ID for me, with no documents associated with either. Still! I suppose in a way this is what they’re looking for: proof that I haven’t been paid. It just seems a little fallacious to prove something by producing a lack of evidence.

So this means that I’ll need to come back to the UK again, after my trip to Austin. On the bright side, it should be super-simple from here on – the hard part is over. All I need to do is mail in all the required documents (or lack of them), in a nice big envelope to really emphasise the volume of tax records which don’t exist, wait for them to check that the envelope really is empty, stamp the old passport and I’ll be heading back to Cali.

US visas: why so easy?

As I expected all along, my O-1 visa came through today, so I am now free to live and work in the United States for the next three years.

To be honest, I’m a little surprised at how easy it is to come by a work visa nowadays: although my case was a no-brainer, perhaps they should think about raising the bar. Perhaps 2 Nobel prizes rather than just 1 would keep out the riffraff?

Either way it is great news and it’s a massive relief for it to be sorted; even not getting the visa would have been better than interminable limbo.

I’m sending waves of good energy and positive karma to my co-founder Amir and lawyer Chris for all their help.

US visas: why so difficult?

More doom and gloom from our visa lawyer, I’m afraid.

A few of the recent O-1 applications he’s made have been denied, unfortunately, despite them having strong cases to make; cases as strong as ours will be…

It’s probably to do with the economic downturn – the pressure to defend American jobs is definitely growing as unemployment increases. The technology sector should be relatively solid, but with news like Microsoft cutting 5000 US jobs, I can see the Citizenship and Immigration Services raising the bar a little bit, whether implicitly or explicitly, deliberately or subconsciously.

I suppose they want to give those laid off MS workers a chance to “get first pick” of all the other jobs out there, and ensure that us job-snatching interlopers don’t stage a bloodless coup of the labour market.

Unfortunately, that makes absolutely no sense at all. For people like me and my co-founders, people whose stated purpose is to start a business, create jobs and grow the economy, being denied access robs a country of the potential upside (albeit small in each individual case) and greatly increases our chances of failure. Oh and if we fail, we’ll unfortunately be taking a bunch of US investment capital to the grave with us, further destabilising the situation.

The idea that not letting us do a startup in the US will somehow give American entrepreneurs an advantage is patently bollocks. In fact, lively, varied, cosmopolitan environments – the sort of environment you encourage and nuture by… well, for starters letting people into the country – give rise to fantastic ideas. Fantastic ideas that US industry would benefit from, not suffer.

Not only that, but barring me from your country is not going to make it any harder for me to put my product in front of your residents. I’m not going to be leaving a hole that your own home-grown entrepreneurs will be able to fill. It’s just going to make my life extremely awkward.

It smacks of intellectual protectionism, and is retarded for all the same reasons as economic protectionism, plus a few more.

What’s the thought process here?

So, these people with good degrees, solid work history, ambition and no criminal record want to come to my country to give jobs to my peers? If they succeed, everyone gets rich. If they fail, a small number of wealthy people lose money they knew might be lost?

Not a chance! Go and blight some other country with your presence and tax revenue!