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Ding! Ding! All change on the immigration bus please.Posted on Sunday 4 November 2007 at 01:57 - Post Comment
Well, what a week this has been! Back at work and all has been going swimmingly. The new Recruitment Coordinator is working out a treat and doing a fab job. We beat the month's budget (with much help from yours truly
You see, as local employers we get invited to all sorts of stuff where we may be able to help people out, and seeing as half the job here is about who you know, I decided to take up an invitation to attend this one as an opportunity to make a few contacts. The first speaker was? Only the deputy manager of Christchurch Immigration Services! After the presentation, I grabbed hold of her as I had some questions about my plans to be sponsored by Select, and the current police checks that we had were going to soon be out of date.
The first thing she said? 'Why are you bothering with this sponsorship thing?' and the second was 'I would stake my life on it that you will be selected from the pool of applicants if you let us know that you want to apply as a skilled working using the Expression of Interest (EOI in immigration speak) forms you can get to online.'
Well you could have knocked me down with a feather. Here was an immigration - no - THE immigration person for ChCh telling me that I could halve the cost and chop 2 years off the time of us getting NZ residency. To say I arrived home a little excited that evening would be an understatement. I was straight online, and found all the relevent forms - and just could not sleep that night from the thoughts in my head. Come 5am I was up and online, filling it all in. Over the next day the lady actually called me to confirm the skilled stream she thought would best suit me (how nice is that?!) and to encourage me to get my EOI in before this coming Wednesday which is when they next select people from the applicant pool.
Guess what we've just this minute done? Yup - clicked the 'SUBMIT' button for the EOI, and it is now with NZ Immigration and we will just have to wait and see what happens.
How much can change, in so short a time, just because I did what no one else at work did - and grabbed an opportunity. Just shows what happens when you put yourself out there doesn't it?! If I hadn't gone, I'd have started us down a route that would have cost us $4000+, and would have got us residency in 2 years. The way it's looking, there is a slight chance we could have those beautiful blue stickers in our passports before Christmas! Nice!
In a fit of excitement, we have been putting some real effort into the house this weekend. The front garden has been completely revamped from a patch of weeds into a grass/ flax/ palm garden. Very nice it looks too - apart from the mixed colour bark mulch. I got 2 extra bags to add to what we already had and it was bright red where as the original stuff is dark brown. As it was dark when I put it on the garden, I didn't notice and then T came down and said 'why did you buy a different colour you daft man!'. Doh! Ah well, I've mixed it together with the other stuff and it actually looks alright.
We've also planted and hung some wall boxes on our balcony which has livened it up a bit and made it look a little less harsh. We've got petunias, lobelia, and begonias in them, along with rocket, basil and corriander to add a little easy-access flavour for salads and the like. They've taken really well and look great so I'm well chuffed.
Today I have just finished putting up the shelving that we got from T's work for $20. It looks the nuts, and I am SO pleased with it. (How sad to be excited and happy about shelving!) It has so much storage on it that I have put nearly all the stuff in the garage on there and it only takes about a 1/4 of the space so the opportunities to collect tat and rubbish (those who know me are ware of my hoarding tendancies) are pretty much boundless. Drilling the mounting holes in the concrete walls was a long-winded and noisy affair as concrete is bloody hard work, but we got there in the end, and the sacrifice of 1 drill bit to the god of DIY was well worth it. T came down to inspect, and cynically placed my level on the 1st shelf - only to be astonished when it was actually level. Hey - even *I* was surprised!
So, the afternoon awaits, and as it is so nice I am going to check the tides and see if a bit of fishing is an option this evening.
Sunshine, warmth, new house, loving it
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) and so I'll see a nice lump of commission come pay day which I'm happy with, and to cap it all off our temp staff numbers have broken the 40 mark and this is great news. Also, it was a work related event - an evening seminar about how to empoy graduating overseas students - that has pretty much turned our immigration situation on its head.
