Flawless America...???

OK ! I landed in the Unites States about a year ago and always heard that the system in the US is flawless.

Once you land here, you need to get an I-94 document apart from the VISA which you have. The I-94 is the document which says how long you can stay in the USA. My I-94 said that I can stay until 2011, which is perfectly fine and is inline with my VISA.

The issue is what if the person or the officer who did the data entry had a bad day in office and as a result screwed up my details. YES unfortunately this is what exactly happened and he/she wrongly entered my date as 2009, which meant I was illegal in the US for a couple of weeks with no fault of mine.

How did I get to know of this mis-match….had applied for a Learners Permit to be able to drive. The Permit was given to me for 3 months, upto Oct’2009, but normally it is given for a year. I questioned them the day it was issued, but the Motor Vehicle Authority informed me that the system gave them that date, so they could not help me.

After 3 months when I went to get my permanent license, the system did not allow them to extend the dates beyond Oct’2009.Here comes the trouble…!!! They some how found out that the data which has been entered into the Homeland Security is wrongly entered and to get that fixed I have to contact the USCIS.

Upon investigation at USCIS, they informed me that the data needs to be corrected by the Bureau of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) ...wao i was getting to know a few new terms and offices here.

Went to the CBP and it took 2 weeks for them to get my information corrected in the homeland security data.

In this land of the greats where the system is such organized and perfect, I was able to find a loop hole. May be the american system is perfect but the person who entered the data was not an American…ha-ha.

Oh Yes..now i am able to drive again...!!!

-GAG