As you wish… It’s a REALLY slow day at work. Be warned, I suck at summarizing things.
I was working a 100% travel position in Minnesota, but everything related to getting my ARC/dual citizenship were in other jurisdictions.
When I applied for my passport, they didn’t need the translation for my birth certificate and parent’s marriage license, so I didn’t think too much about it. However, when I received my passport in June, that was when I not only started making my exit strategy (resigning from my work, booking flights, and even a concert), but when I also started to authenticate documents needed for my ARC.
I either missed the instructions or it didn’t say that TECO would only accept translations from their same jurisdiction, so I had everything that I needed to have translated notarized in Minnesota, but when they came back from their respective offices (Los Angeles, Seattle, Washington DC) around July-August, it’d probably need another 3 weeks in Chicago (Minnesota’s jurisdiction), and I didn’t want to take any chances of missing the documents, so I just decided to wait until I was in Taiwan to get the documents translated.
For my driver’s license, I REALLY wish I would’ve thought of it sooner, but maybe the delay was for the better in a way; if I requested it any earlier, it’d probably no longer be valid given how long it finally took to arrive: Since car parking is a nightmare around my mom’s condo in Taiwan and I wanted to double-dip and be licensed to ride motorcycles in the US too, I decided to take the motorcycle class and earn my motorcycle endorsement in the US, which I passed in mid-August and emailed my certificate over to Idaho’s DMV just 10 minutes before the UPS Store closed (where I notarized and requested it to be sent express).
When I finally made it over to Idaho at the beginning of September, my new license finally arrived at my mailbox on Saturday at 3 PM; the place closes at 4 on Saturdays, and I was due to fly out the next morning… I actually had to bring in my laptop, then translate my license on the spot and print it out, and notarize both that and my driving record (which I got 2 days ago and already finished) in the lobby. Luckily for me, Idaho is in the same jurisdiction as TECO Seattle, so I didn’t have to send it elsewhere… Also, if ANY of it was delayed, I’d be screwed.
However, what sucked was that I didn’t follow their procedure exactly and they held my application for a while; I told them to process it as normal, but 2 weeks later they sent a follow-up email asking what I wanted to do
, then after taking their sweet time processing it, sending it by regular mail took almost a month; by the time I got my license translation and driving records back, I only had 6 days left out of the 3 month validity window of my driving records to swap it in for a Taiwanese driver’s license.