U-S-A part1

We were in Florida for 2 weeks up to and just after Christmas. We had a good time (it's hard not to in Orlando) but a few things about the US of A struck as as odd, irritating or downright bizarre. So what does USA stand for ?


1. Unbelievably Slow Admission

When we arrived at Orlando International, we were quick off the plane and so faced only a short queue at immigration. Officials at the holiday airports always seem friendlier than those I remember at JFK. Or maybe it's just that I was exposed to a very fierce agent once in the past and they all seem benign by comparison.

In any case, with just 2 groups ahead of us (and one of those groups only had 1 person), I assumed we would be through in no time.

Not so. The official in our line ("Colon" was his name) was quite outstandingly slow. It actually took us just short of an hour to emerge. Truly remarkable.

Mind you, the US have their entry procedures in quite a pickle in my opinion. It seems to me they are actually pretty disorganized.

I assume that behind it all, the CIA/NSA/FBI are actually doing a good job tracking those who really need to be tracked and traced but for the average traveller their procedures look a mess.

I have been to the US dozens of times, and the green I94 visa waiver form is still with us, but they have added to it without ever streamlining it.

So now we have to fill in our vacation address before we leave the UK and the airline have to provide that to the US authorities in electronic form but we STILL have to write it on the form (and all this despite the fact that they can't very well check we have given a genuine address).

They added finger printing (which they keep a record of, but which we still have to complete from scratch each time) and then they introduced electronic visa waivers (ESTA) BUT they did not phase out any of the paper forms. You need to do both, for further duplication, so the paperwork just grows and grows.

Not that they have left the I-94W totally un-updated. No, they have now added fields for phone number and email - neither of which they are conceivably going to use. You would think that when they modify the form (understandably they so not wish to do so too often) they would correct the more obvious failings and inconsistencies.

For example: they use a grid format on the form despite the fact that many names, addresses and even country names will not fit in the number of spaces provided. But on the back of the form, they don't. And on the customs forms, they don't.

On the I-94W itself, there are 4 places to put your country - all the fields have different lengths. There is little enough room for names that many people will have an issue, but they allow 6 spaces to denote sex (M/F).

The new and pointless email field is ridiculously short - if you allow 11 or 12 spaces for "@hotmail.com" (hardly the longest domain name) there are 7 spaces left for the rest of the address. It would not take a genius to realise that this will be sufficient for almost no-one.

The entry procedure itself consists of presumably high-tech finger-printing and photo-recognition with an extraordinary amount of stapling and rubber-stamping.

In fact, on reflection, one hour wasn't bad just based on the number of staples and stamps that our agent had to process.


Unhelpful, Stupid, Annoying