This summer I paid a ridiculous amount of money – more than double what it would have cost just a week earlier, too – to renew my permanent residency, so that I may stay stateside. The reason for the massively increased rate, I was told, was to cover the extra fees for the new biometric requirements, and that I was to go for a super-important biometric appointment when summoned. That was today, and boy do I feel ripped off.

Biometric, what a great word, it makes me think they’re doing to do all these super-accurate DNA tests, use high-tech state of the art equipment, iris scans, midichlorian tests, I don’t even know what I imagined. We were told to leave all cellphones outside the building, perhaps it interferes with their space-age scanning equipment, welcome to the future.

But what a let-down! All they did was take my fingerprints (which they already did before, both at the visa interview in London and at the airport on arrival), take my signature (again, they have that), and then take a photo of me at distance and in bad light with my glasses off (all the bags suddenly revealed under my spectacle-less eyes from having just woken up). I had to fill out a piece of paper with stuff like height and eye color on it – and they rounded down on the height, I was being as accurate as I could and they rounded down because their ancient DOS system computer required it) And that was it, see you later, you’ll hear from someone in the post.

They could at least have pretended! They could have just got some little red light and shone it in my ear and typed a few random numbers into a field I don’t understand, and I would have been happy, money probably well spent. But taking information they already have, and charging hundreds of extra dollars for it… I feel like Tottenham Hotspur did after spending sixteen million quid on Darren Bent when we already have perfectly good goalposts. Still, it’s gotta be done…

Originally posted at 20six.co.uk/petescully