A project in South Africa

I have never been to South Africa before. But I have seen the pictures taken by a friend who is a globetrotter. From those pictures, I have only one thing to say. South Africa is beautiful. The other day, this country came into the focus of one of the conversations with a newly acquired friend. My friend was assigned a project where he had to work from the client office in South Africa for a short duration.

As the first step, my friend applied for a visa. South Africa seems to be very sensitive about immigration policies. This is when he came across a simple regulation while applying for a visa to South Africa. While submitting the application, he is also supposed to get a clearance certificate from all the countries where he had visited in the past. This is a simple regulation to ensure the applicants were not involved in any kind of criminal activities in those countries.

My friend has traveled to many countries as part of his work. So, he did a tour of the consulates of all those countries. There, he discovered the way of working in the consulates when it comes to giving a clearance. Some of the countries are quick by checking the visa details and giving him what was needed. Some countries sends the information back to their home where the request gets processed. Anybody who has been tangled in the web of diplomatic procedures know how tedious this process can be.

What happened in the end? When he got all the clearances, the project was over. This is not the weird part in this tale. Since his assignment was to be carried out in the client location, there was no working place arranged for him at his office to execute this project. So, he was asked to work from home and connect remotely to the client network. To sum up, he executed the project by working from home, never visiting South Africa and doing a tour of all the consulates. Isn't that a lot of fun while accomplishing quite a lot?

Tags: Musings,Consulate,South Africa,Visa,Work

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