How Home Affairs turned me into an incel
You think Odysseus had trouble finding his way home? Please, that was nothing. Try finding your way through the labyrinth of conflicting and often outdated information provided by home affairs, AI, immigration blogs and social media, with many posts by confused visitors who suffered a similar fate as the Dirty Blonde.
Read more here:
Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.
I feel your pain, Sire!
Hoorah! After numerous interactions with their new online portal (which still doesn’t work properly or at all), no less than 17 email comms (plus around 11 phone calls via cell at my expense and including a telephone call to one of the Directors of SHA who was at the time in hospital and about to go into theatre for a surgery), three in person visits to DHA in PE (fancy new office which is almost as dysfunctional as the old one thanks to the staff), and waiting 7 months, I finally received my new ID card.
Oh, I forgot to mention an old application approximately 7 years ago, done online, where I was never notified that the card was ready and DHA unilaterally decided I wasn’t going to collect it (despite informing me it was ready, which they most certainly did not) and destroyed my new card and kept the R140 odd I paid for it.
The need for the new ID card was/is to attend at my bank (for the third time) to re-do my change of address, and re-activate my cellphone banking app (the rollout of their shiny. all new app biometrics app doesn’t work on my Samsung for some reason), which I have been told must by done by the end of this month, failing which I lose the ability to use the old app, which they did a rollback to so that my family didn’t starve to death, due to inaccessibility to my hard earned funds.
Jesus wept, I tell you – and so did I (almost), several times, out of sheer frustration.
Have a safe and ridiculously fabulous weekend, regardless of the “situation”. Our sense of humour is just about all we have left and have unfettered access to. 😉