The short answer why our move will probably be pushed back more than three weeks is this:

It is literally easier to just accept a mistake than to fix it.

Yeah.

So, the more complicated answer is probably not all that interesting to most people. And to be honest, I’m not entirely sure I fully understand it myself. With those disclaimers out of the way, here we go.

Basically, Chris’ initial offer letter listed Sept. 1 as his proposed start date. Everyone we know who has been through this process or knows about it basically laughed and said those dates are always crazy unrealistic, and not worry about it. Sure enough, we were later asked to put on a form the day we “want” to leave.

(Side note: January 2017 — my dream date so that we could still go to a friend’s wedding in Mexico in December — was apparently out of the question. Waaaaaa!)

So, we chose Oct. 1. Filled out a bunch of forms, then patiently waited for Chris’ orders to come so that we could start submitting the most important things, the official passports and the visas. And then the orders arrived. YAY!

Until we looked carefully and noticed:
1) Chris inexplicably had the wrong job title listed. (Like, way off)
2) Our start date was listed as more than three weeks later that we requested

Naturally, these orders were sent at the end of the (Italian) business day on a Friday. Ok, we think, we’ll get them to fix it Monday so we can get our next document in. Just kidding, Monday is a holiday in Italy. Tuesday, then? Haha, it is August in Italy. Everyone is on vacation for the rest of the month. Ok, how about one of the Americans working there help us? Bahahahahahaha.

So, after wasting a week trying to get these orders amended, the advice we were given was to change the dates on our official passport applications to reflect the date on the orders. Then change the date on our visa applications to reflect the dates on the orders and passports. Then, only after the visas are granted, can we try to change the date. Except that visas are processed in order based on expected arrival date, so you can probably guess how likely it is that we’ll get it significantly earlier than our dates.

So we basically gave up. The kids and I made another trek to work with Chris to redo the paperwork. The kids had a lot of fun, as you can see:

This is actually not the first snafu that has affected our timeline, though we didn’t know it until recently. Chris interviewed for his job in early June, thought it went really well and that he was extremely well-qualified for it (it is literally his exact job now, including some specific aspects that few other people with similar positions would have done. Yes, this is vague) and that he had a good shot. Then we heard … nothing. We got annoyed, booked another vacation as a combination tantrum-and-jinx-attempt and started to give up hope. And then, a month later, we found out he got it! (Read about that here: Here)

More recently, we found out the reason that it took so long. Apparently they chose Chris basically immediately and told HR to notify him. Except somewhere along the way, someone misspelled his name and couldn’t, somehow, find him in the system so that they could let him know. For reasons that are unclear to me, it appears that whoever encountered this problem just kind of shrugged and moved on. A month later, Chris’ future supervisor went and asked HR why he hadn’t heard back from Chris yet and found out he’d never actually been offered the job. He was notified the next day (again, BY E-MAIL. That still seems insane).

Whoops.

(We canceled the tantrum vacation, by the way. More on that at a later day.)