What a pain in the ass. There are a bunch of documents I need to provide before I can move to the Netherlands. Most of them, like my college diploma, they already have on file from last time. The problems, of course, are the same two that were problems last time: my birth and marriage certificates. It’s not like I’ve been born again (in any sense) or married again in the last three years, but the official certificate isn’t enough for them. They require an apostille to further legalize it – which is basically a stamp from the state of Pennsylvania saying yes, these are our legal documents and we vouch for them.
It sounds like it would be tedious, but not that awful: request birth certificate (from state office), request marriage certificate (from county office, send both back to state for apostille, get them back again, send on to HR person. But it’s worse than that.
The county is still living in olden days: there are two ways to request a marriage certificate, in person and online. In person is obviously out (and I won’t ask my mother to do it; it’s quite a long drive through traffic that scares her. My brother and SIL already have over an hour commute, in the other direction). But by mail is also problematic: you are supposed to send a check and SASE. I can’t find the checkbook for my US bank account, not having used it in a good three years; I have accounts in the Netherlands and Taiwan but neither place even uses checks, at all. I don’t keep US stamps around, either. I could send a FedEx airbill with my credit card number on it, but the only ones I have access to are international airbills. I guess that would be OK, even for domestic mailing.
The state at least gives you a choice: request the certificate by mail (sending a check and SASE) or online. By mail has all the problems listed above, but the online method has an issue of its own: you pay by credit card and they will only send the certificate to the billing address of the credit card. Because US credit cards require a US address, that means it gets sent to my in-laws, who kindly let us use their address for US mail. Oh, yes, and the fees are $10 for the certificate, $8 for the online service, and $17 for airmail, which is the default.
Also, I’m not really crazy about trusting international mails enough to have stuff sent here and then send it back for the apostille. Fortunately my in-laws are nice enough that they’ll help us on this. So I’ve requested the birth cert and it should be sent to their house in a few days. I’ll either find a checkbook and send mail requesting the marriage cert to be sent to them along with a preaddressed, prepaid FedEx airbill, or ask them (or my mother) to send the request, with a SASE.
Then they’ll send the birth and marriage certificates to the state capitol (which, by the way, is on the opposite coast from them) along with a prepaid airbill, to be sent either to me or to the HR person directly.
Are you tired yet? Because I am, just from writing all that, let alone doing it.
Shoot. I was hoping you’d be allowed to sidestep all this hore hockey this time. ~LA