CerebralDebris

Man, Charlotte and I sent 2008 out with a bang. We got married, we had a big Christmas trip, and we threw a Caribbean-themed New Year’s party which almost FIVE PEOPLE attended (including us)! Clearly, we are social butterflies.

Alas, bad luck comes in waves, and one such wave crashed over us in the first few weeks of 2009. You see, Charlotte is here in the states on an L1 visa, which means that she can only work for the company that brought her here. It’s non-transferable. One of the nice benefits of marrying me, aside from the true love and the uh … incessant cackling … is that she will obtain permanent residency, and authorization to work wherever she chooses. Options are always a good thing.

To start this process, however, you have to have not your completed marriage license, but the marriage certificate that the city gives you once you return the completed marriage license. Ok, no problem, right? Our officiant and others were like “just mail it in, takes two weeks, all is well.”

We get married on a Friday night, mail the certificate on Monday, and get delivery confirmation on December 5. Sweet! So two weeks pass. And three. And five … now I know you’re wondering: why did they wait so long? Well, their website says 20 business days, and the dude at the bureau itself told us “more like six to eight weeks” … what we failed to understand is if you just walk the paper in and hand it to them, instead of mailing it, they give you the certificate RIGHT THEN. Oh, if only we’d understood.

Anyway, at seven weeks, Charlotte goes on a business trip to Texas and learns that her job will be ending at the end of February. Hooray, crappy economy. This is a bad thing, because we live in the most expensive city in the United States (and one of the five most expensive cities in the world, according to a recent report). This is a double-bad thing when she can’t even begin her job search, because we haven’t filed our application for work authorization, because the papers haven’t come. This is a TRIPLE bad thing when you factor in that the work authorization will take 12-14 weeks to come in, from the date of filing, and there’s only seven weeks until the end of February. Eep!

So we go to the marriage bureau, and explain our situation, and the lady’s like “oh, yeh, just go to window four and they’ll take care of you.”

Unfortunately, at window four we discover that the entirety of the marriage bureau has been packed into boxes, because they are moving offices that weekend. There is one depressingly small stack of unprocessed licenses, which they rapidly file through. Strangely, ours isn’t there, even though our information is not in the computer and therefore our license hasn’t been processed. “It must be packed away. Or lost,” they tell us, helpfully. “Sorry. Come to the new offices on Monday.”

A quick call to our immigration lawyer later, we’ve learned that no, we can’t just get married a second time right there at city hall. See, if we fill out new papers, with the new date, and start the visa process, and then the old papers turn up, they completely invalidate the new papers, and the whole process starts over again, with the extra-fun possibility that Charlotte gets booted out of the country in the interim. Yet at the same time, the state and federal government do not consider us married until a license of some sort is processed. Awesome!

After hyperventilating for a while, we decide that on Monday, I shall venture forth into the twenty-four-degree weather and make a trip to the new marriage bureau. In the interim, we will … try not to think to much about how all of this sucks!

Monday was today. I went forth into the cold, cold wind and hiked my ass over to Centre St. in Manhattan. I will say this for the new marriage bureau: it’s approximately seven hundred thousand times less depressing than the old one. It’s sort of like modern DMVS — tons of information desks, and everyone gets numbers and can wait patiently in comfortable seating. Except if the DMV sold flowers and had a giant picture of a completely fake (and much prettier than the real thing) city hall that happy newlyweds can stand in front of for photo ops.

The friendly lady at window four (brand new building, same window number) helpfully goes through the entire stack of unprocessed licenses yet again. No dice. Now she turns to the folders labeled “PROBLEM” in huge black letters. These include licenses that haven’t been signed properly, licenses where the wedding officiant wasn’t actually legally registered to perform marriages in this state (!!), and licenses where the best man puked on it midway through the reception and now it’s illegible. Fortunately — sort of — our license wasn’t there either.

Now I’m feeling about ready to beat up a girl scout, or a puppy, or something. The only viable solution to a lost license is to get a new one, back-date it to the date of the wedding, and then send it around to the exact same officiant and witnesses for signatures. This would require some effort, considering the officiant lives way out in Long Island, and one of the witnesses lives in Paris. Not impossible, of course, but a further source of delay during a period where we seriously don’t want to be delayed any longer.

“Well, let me go check the processed archives, just to be sure,” the lady says, in a voice that says she’s about as sure that she’ll find it there as she is that Jesus himself will come crashing through the windows to deliver the license. But she goes and looks. I lean against the counter and pray for a swift, merciful death.

And then, just like that, the wave recedes. The bad luck washes away, and my new best friend at the Marriage Bureau shows up holding a sheet of paper and smiling.

“They put it in the processed pile without processing it!” she tells me, and I’m too elated to say anything more than “awesome!”

So there you have it, my friends. Charlotte and I are now officially married in the eyes of New York State and the United States Government, after seven weeks of limbo. We can file her papers this week, and she can go forth into what we hope will be a short, relaxing break before she begins a new job. We’ll continue enjoying our New York life – which currently involves a lot of looking for houses and bitching about the cold – and all will be very well indeed.

And that is my tale of misery, and woe, and joy!