This week, I finally got around to sorting out my EP visa. Like all bits of officialdom, everything has a three letter acronym and lots of application forms to get it.
Singapore is no different than anywhere else in the world in respect to the sheer amount of forms you have to fill in just to be able to use three sheets of toilet paper in a visit rather than the two.
Having spent the last year of my life being given the full on treatment of Her Majesties effectiveness in bureaucracy and sheer crappiness of arranging and coordinating absolutely anything that involves one piece of paper being passed correctly six feet to the person on the other desk without a 3 week delay and 5 phone calls for it to be fixed, I was half expecting that Singapore would be similar given the amount of forms that need to be filled in to arrive/live/work here.
UK paperwork officialdom people really should come here for one of those 3 week learning exercises as it really is a well-oiled machine here.
On Friday, I took the morning off to come down to the Mom (Ministry of Manpower) at Clark Quay.
MoM is one of the things all newcomers need to go and do. Basically, all the paperwork that you’ve gone through to get here and live and work needs to be made official with the government department of manpower.
Needless to say, I’d resigned myself to taking off the whole morning to get my mountain of forms looked at, my fingerprints taken and a passport photo taken. Having done some similar exercises in the UK, I knew that my very life force was likely to be sucked from my frontal lobe with pen pushing lack of efficiency by some little twat with a red biro in his front shirt pocket.
It was a pleasant surprise to be, erm, surprised.
The Mom is probably the most efficiently run, f*ckwit free place I’ve ever been to. So much so, they actually realise that you are the most likely fu*ckwit candidate in the entire place and throw themselves upon you like you are a human hand-grenade made of f*ckwit shrapnel and if not defused immediately of the forms and paperwork that you carry, you might explode and infect the place with ineffectiveness and general f*ckwittedness ™
As you step out of the lift on the fourth floor, which incidentally, is beautifully sing posted I might add, they literally have an armed guard of commando trained middle age women who wrench the paperwork out of your hands, check it, fill in all the mistakes you’ve made, take a passport photo of you (which you forgot to bring), sort out the new amended appointment (as you’ve come on the wrong day – see past history on this) and usher you to a counter with a 40” plasma telly over it with the words “Andy! – Shut up and queue here flashing on it”
After 5 minutes you leave with no paperwork and a bit of plastic with your name on it saying “Welcome to Singapore – you’re Legal!” written on it.
It’s truly a master class in how to run stuff.
I left feeling slightly violated, but in equal measure felt as though I’d spent far to long queuing up for shit in other parts of the world. Leaving this kind of efficiency behind will not be an easy task.
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