Naturalization interview and exam

My wife and I have had our naturalization interview and exam today (April 8th 2013), and as promised, here are my notes:

Upon arrival at the USCIS office, a quick note in reply to a question raised by a reader: The parking at the USCIS parking lot costs $7, and they accept cash only. It’s not a lot, considering the hundreds of dollars you have put into the naturalization process, but worth knowing. Unfortunately, there are no other parking lots anywhere within walking distance. Also, there are no return privileges, so if you leave the lot to grab a lunch, like we did between the naturalization interview and the ceremony…be ready to pay again.

The security check was similar to before, though this time; I didn’t bring my Leatherman so things were smoother. After going through the metal detector, we waited in line for a clerk to check our admission paper (form I-979C) and our ID as well. Afterwards, we were sent upstairs to wait for our turn, where they have about 100 chairs in the waiting room. At the time of our arrival, there were about 20 people before is. It’s unclear to me what the call-in order is, because we got in before several of the people who already sat there, and they called us in about 10 minutes before our original appointment time, so clearly, they call people in by check-in order. I can only guess that some of those that were sitting in the waiting room were after the interview and were simply waiting for the oath ceremony. It appears there are approximately 10 officers conducting the interviews, and a new person was being called in every 3-4 minutes or so. An office comes out of the interview area, which is behind a closed door, and calls a last-name. I was called in first, and my wife (who was originally summoned for the same time of 11:05) about 10 minutes later.

Upon being called in, you enter the USCIS officer’s office. My interviewer was Katherine, and it appears that the office where the interview is conducted is her own private office (I hear that some other offices have dedicated interview rooms). During the interview you are asked to raise your right hand and swear to tell the truth during this process (this is NOT the oath or pledge of allegiance…just an oath to not lie to the officer about your details and data). The officer goes through various parts of the N-400 form you filled. For example, they verify your name, address, phone numbers, social security number, dates of trips outside the country and more (If you don’t remember your SSN by heart, that’s OK – you can bring your Social Security card with you, or just quote the last 4 digits of it, if you remember those).

I have actually taken a trip outside the US after filing the N-400, so I mentioned this to the officer and explained why I needed to take it (family matters). It was not a big hassle and I wasn’t asked for much detail, so if you’re contemplating taking a trip while waiting for your interview, no need to abstain from taking them…as long as you note the dates and that the day-count doesn’t hurt your total time out in the US parameter (*).

During the interview, the officer chats with you about various things, and small-talk is acceptable, as well as light humor. For example, my wife was asked whether she practiced prostitution, to which she responded sarcastically with “look at me…do I look like I could make money in that?” (Referring to her physique not being super-model material…). The joke was well received. I, on the other hand, mentioned some of my experiences with the Mensa organization, as well as my part-time career as a writer and as a comedian. The officer was clearly impressed by my experiences and commented on it positively.

The officer went with me over the various yes/no questions from the form, such as “have you ever served in the US armed forces”, “do you understand the full oath of allegiance to the united states” and other questions that are on part 10 of the N-400 form (pages 6-9). Finally, I was asked to print my name and sign the bottom of the form (the part I was asked NOT to sign originally when filing the application).

At this point, the test is given. First, the officer asks you to read a sentence from the page. Mine was “Who can vote”. Then, you are asked to write a sentence read to you. Mine was the answer “Citizens can vote”. The officer then asks you the 10 questions. The officer told me that she rotated the questions on a weekly basis, and every officer has his own questions. I didn’t make any mistakes, and since you need only 6 correct answers to pass, the test was stopped after I answered 6 questions correctly.

At this point, the officer prints and gives you a form with the conclusion (that you passed, or failed), in addition to a paper-slip with the time and date of your oath ceremony. The officer also gives you back your I-797C form, your passport, ID and green card. The entire process took less than 15 minutes, although it took a bit longer for my wife – about 25 minutes. One thing that did NOT go well was that I originally wanted to change my name with this (it’s part of the N-400 form), but Katherine informed me that they cannot actually do that. They say this requires a judge to approve, so they can only do it as part of the larger operation held around Independence Day (**). They suggested that we can either postpone the oath, perform the name change and then complete the oath at a later time or vice versa (complete everything, and then change the name later on, which is what we did). I originally brought an extra passport photo, as well as copies of my documents, but I wasn’t asked for any of that. My wife, though, was asked for the extra photo, because they accidentally damaged her original photo. Lastly, we were asked to sign a document affirming we won’t do anything bad from now till my ceremony (like get married to someone else…  )

The Ceremony starts at 1:05PM, so we had almost 2 hours of waiting, and we went out to get lunch. There’s a diner called Randy, about 1 mile north, close to the Boeing factory, and it’s very affordable.

Before the ceremony, everyone waits at the same place as before, and this time, the floor was full. There were 80 new citizens, and about 30-40 relatives and friends who came to witness the event. When the time came, the officers sent us all downstairs to form 3 lines. One line for visitors, and 2 lines for the actual citizens to check-in. The USCIS officers asked for the slip we got from the officer earlier, checked us against a list, and also took our Green-cards. Each person was assigned a personal seat inside and given an envelope with several papers and documents. This included a text of the national anthem, the pledge, the oath, a passport request form, a greeting from the President of the USA, a holder for the naturalization certificate and a checklist of everything.

Inside the ceremony hall, an officer provided a briefing about the proceedings, including several warnings about NOT damaging the naturalization certificate that we are about to receive, as replacing it costs a LOT of money ($345, which are a lot of teriyaki bowls, as he described it…his words, not mine). We were also reminded to check the certificate we got, to make sure it was all accurate, because if there are mistakes, they can correct them freely on the spot…but if we went home and found an error, it would cost as a new certificate (again, that’s $345…so you might consider storing that piece of paper in a safe!). This was followed by a quick video montage with music, saying the oath of allegiance while standing (with right-hand raised), a music-video of a country song about the USA, singing the national anthem, a short recorded speech by the President and reciting the pledge of allegiance.

Finally, the called each of us personally to walk on-stage and get his naturalization certificate, with a handshake from the officer. During this part, a lot of people had their picture taken by friends and family (I placed my phone on a groove on one of the beams, and videotaped us getting the certificate). They also gave us a voter registration card. Once that was done, there was another little speech by the officer of the USCIS, and we went about our ways. The entire ceremony, including everything, was about 90 minutes.

* This is one of the rules of naturalization – you have to spend at least half the period that’s the basis for your naturalization inside the US. In our case, since we applied after being green-card holders for 5 years, we needed to make sure our total time outside the US was no more than 2.5 years.

** During Independence Day, there’s a major naturalization ceremony, typically with thousands of participants, and a lot of people prefer to go through naturalization around that time and be a part of that event. That event is held in Seattle, close to the Space Needle, and during it there are some extra services, like the ability to change a person’s name.

Surface Tension

When I’m on my exercise bike, nothing passes the time like watching a movie or a TV show. My Surface RT 10” tablet by Microsoft (given to me for free as a Microsoft employee) is a great device for this…if you set it up correctly.

Watching movies on the surface is built-in, so you can simply double-tap a movie file to play it with the built in Xbox media player. However, it’s a fairly limited player, and navigating the file explorer interface can be cumbersome on the small screen.

The first thing I needed to make the experience better is a way to view my files. The best app I found for this was “my explorer”. This is a file explorer for the “modern” interface, with large icons and the ability to save your favorite folders. For me, this is over the network to my main file server.

Once I defined my folders, I needed a good player, and for me, the ability to seek comfortably is critical, because skipping over commercials or jumping back a few seconds to catch a word you missed needs to be easy. Every player has a scroll-bar to navigate, but it’s not granular enough for even a 45 minute TV show. You slide your finger a bit, and you find yourself way too far. With PC-based software like XBMC, you can assign a button to jump 30 seconds back or forth, but most tablet players do not. One that does have a brilliant design is “PressPlay video”. Besides being able to associate to video files in the Modern UI (so it will play movies directly when tapped in My Explorer (many other players require you to use the File/Open interface, which is slow and cumbersome), it has a micro-seek function. With Micro-seek, you swipe up or down the screen, which skips forward or backward between 1 second and a full minute (depending on how much you swipe). This is extremely accurate and efficient. Want to skip back 10 seconds? Simply drag from top to bottom about 20% of the screen, and you’re there.

Another feature it has is the ability to playback at faster or slower speeds. This is handy if there’s something you NEED to watch, but it’s not particularly enjoyable. Playing a training video at X2 speed saves a lot of time, but still exposes you to the entire content.

Happy watching!

Drive straight in

Most homes in America have a standard raised driveway, with a rain gutter. When I moved to the states and started living in one, I felt that the way my car handles the gutter was uncomfortable, to say the least. Unless I drove over it at 1 mph it less, it would give me a nasty and noisy bump.

As it turns out, a lot of people feel the same, and several companies offer a solution. The popular one is bridgit, available for around $300 on amazon. It’s especially designed for this.

However, 300$ is a lot of dough, even for a stand up hi-tech fellow like me, so I looked for something more affordable.

When I visited a playground with my kid, I noticed that the entire thing was on a rubbery platform made of tiles. It too is made from the same material as the bridgit...recycled tires. The platform is made if 2'x2' tiles, and at the platforms edge, 4' ramps!

A quick search turned out that just a few miles away was a company that erects all these playgrounds....northwest playground equipment . I went over, and grabbed a few of the ramp pieces, for about $65 each. Three of those were enough for my entire driveway, and so for less than $200, I had my solution. In fact, I could have done ok with just 2 pieces, and occasionally, they have returns or pieces they pick up from renovation projects that are even cheaper.

Storm Season

A few weeks ago, at the start of the storm and snow season, I decided to prepare an emergency kit, to help us get by in case of a situation, such as the extended power outages that happened last year. I consulted many resources to build my kit, and here are the conclusions. This might come in handy now more than ever if you’re on the east coast, as it appears a major storm is about to hit.

Essentially, any house in the USA should be ready for emergencies, because there are always SOME risks. Some places are at risks of storms, others flood, and some earthquakes and tsunamis. Any house, in my opinion, should be ready not only for an extended outage (which would typically be accompanies by shortage of supplies), but also for a situation where you have to quickly leave your house for some reason, and travel as equipped as possible to live independently, but also as light as possible.

The primary concern is typically food and water. For food, I elected to purchase food pellets from SurvaivalTabs, which provide 20 calories each of well-balanced protein, carbs, fats and vitamins. A normal adult lives off about 2000 calories per day, and around 1000 on a harsh diet, but can survive on a lot less. A bottle of 180 tablets weight only 2 pounds and has 3600 calories (and they are quite tasty too). The manufacturer suggests 12 tablets a day as enough to survive, which means one bottle could keep an adult alive for over two weeks. I think 30-40 tablets a day is more realistic, which still means you can live off one bottle for almost a week.

There’s some controversy regarding water intake. “Official” resources say a human needs at least ½ a gallon a day. I believe this is greatly exaggerated, as I rarely drink more than ¾ gallons a day and I can survive on a lot less. Either way, the kit should keep one well for at least 4-5 days, and it’s unrealistic to carry around that kind of weight around. Luckily, my area (Seattle, Washington) has tons of water sources – lakes, ponds and Puget Sound itself, so I opted to carry 3 liters of water (1.5 Gallons) per person, and a portable water filter. I packed 6 bottles of 24 Oz each.

With the other things I’m about to list, the weight was considerable, so I needed to pack it all in a way that I can carry around without killing myself. To do this, I purchased hiking-class backpacks. These come in sizes of 35 liters and above, and two 55-liter packs were enough for everything (we also carry supplies for our 2.5 year old son). You can buy such packs in many places, but store prices are pretty high. Instead, I purchased Kelty Redwing 44 from Amazon, which were $55 each, with free shipping.

Another thing I wanted to have was copies of our important documents and info. I printed copies of our passports, drivers’ licenses, green cards, a copy of our home insurance contract and a copy of our will. I also made a list of important info, like bank accounts, phones, info of my lawyer, and regional emergency info. I also got a large USB drive (32 GB), and copied on it my entire “my documents” folder (which I’ll have to update occasionally, of course). I put all this in a water-tight container, which would also float. I also purchased 10 pieces of 1 OZ of Silver in bullion form and put these in another watertight container. The silver could be used instead of cash in many situations.

I wanted to have some kind of weapon too, but nothing too dangerous or heavy, so I got a sling, with a box of metal pellets. The pellets can be almost as powerful as a bullet in the right hands, and it’s not sensitive to weather, moisture or almost anything else. You also never run out of ammo, as you can use it to sling rocks too.

Other equipment I got for the kit includes:

·         Emergency thermal blankets

·         10 diapers

·         Light-sticks

·         Cable ties

·         Duct tape

·         First aid kit

·         Whistles

·         LED floating flashlight + battery

·         6 ID bracelets (I’d put one on my toddler, in case he gets lost)

·         Gloves (3 pairs)

·         String spool

·         Weatherproof matches

·         Moist wipes

·         Emergency ponchos

·         Craw-bar

·         Plastic bags – small (sealable)

·         Plastic bags – large (sealable)

·         Plastic bags – very large (trash size)

·         Ibuprofen tabs

·         Aspirin tabs

·         Burn gel

·         Acetaminophen tabs

·         Emergency tool (whistle+thermometer+mirror+compus)

·         Multitool (knife, pliers, can opener)

·         Emergency electronics charger (battery+solar)

·         Walkie Talkies (18 miles) + batteries

·         LED Lantern (lasts 50 hours)

·         Dust masks

·         NOAA radio (wind-up charging)

·         Hand sanitizer

I got almost all of the above on eBay and Amazon. Including the backpacks, the entire content cost about 400$.

Naturalization step 2

In response to the Fingerprinting blog post, I received some info from friends who went through similar processes, so I’d like to share the story of one of them. He doesn’t have all the info I would have liked to detail, so some of this is not hard facts. I’ll update this when I have my own experience.

About 3-4 weeks after completing my fingerprinting at the USCIS office in Seattle, I received the interview summons, which was scheduled to about 3-4 weeks later (so, about 1.5 months after the fingerprinting). This was in late 2012, and as loads change over time, your experience might differ. The national average for naturalization is 5 months, with the Seattle office claiming to be at 5.1 months (slightly slower than the average, that is). However, with it being 2-3 weeks from filing to fingerprinting, and another 6-8 weeks, this brings the total to about 8-11 weeks, which is a lot shorter. This means that if you filed on time and you’re lucky, with no holidays to slow down your own process, you might actually be a citizen even before your 5 year period has completed!

The interviews start at 8am at the USCIS office in south Seattle, close to the Boeing museum of flight. I believe the interviews are only scheduled for the morning hours and all are done by noon, though I’m not sure about that. On average, they handle about 60 people there every day (based on regional statistics published by the USCIS), and that’s about the number of people I saw on that day. I believe they were using approximately 10 interview offices, but I might be off, and it’s possible that some days have a different number of offices in use.

After you come in and sign-in, you go to the 2^nd floor of the building, where you wait for your turn. They call you by name, and send you to the interview, which is held in a private office. The officers are nice and the entire interview, including the questions takes about 20-30 minutes. Even though the interview includes a test, the officers are nice and don’t try to trip or trick you. The questions they ask during the test are from a pool of 100 questions, and the officer had his on a printed sheet, so it’s possible that the selection is daily or weekly, though it’s hard to say for sure. Once this is done, you step outside and wait for the ceremony and oath, which is done at noontime. You can ask to have it deferred to another date, but you’d be expected to have a very good reason for that, like some medical situation.

If you don't have a reason to skip the ceremony, all those who passed the interview that day get sworn-in at noontime, in the master auditorium on the 1^st floor, and usually there would be a few people who did their interview before. These “guests” are briefly checked again to see if they committed any crimes since their interview, or spent a significant time outside the US. The ceremony itself takes approximately 1.5 hours, including taking the oath, singing the national anthem, and getting the certificate of citizenship. The USCIS asks participants to dress nicely (no jeans or shorts), so you might as well dress well for the entire day. If you’re the type of person who sweats a lot under pressure, or this happens in the hot days of summer, bringing a change of clothes might be a good idea. Also, if you have any friends or relatives you’d like to have witness the event or take your picture during, make sure they come to the office before noon, so they have time to go through security and find a good spot in the auditorium.

Good luck!

My guide for office productivity

Those who work with me a lot noticed that my response times to mail is very fast, and that I seem to never miss an Email. I do feel that the practices I adopted and developed for handling Email are worth getting to know, so here they are.

 

1.    Keep the inbox empty

The biggest factor, and also the biggest goal of my system are keeping the inbox as empty as possible. The only items that should be there are mail items you are yet to respond to or deal-with. Anything else should be deleted or moved away. The biggest cause of mail loss is items that get old and forgotten because they are buried in a 100 emails.

2.    Use mail folders

Many people have hundreds of emails a day and no one can read all of it. Letting it accumulate in your inbox and trying to find the relevant pieces between the background noise is a recipe for disaster. My solution is to use mail folders, and not skimp. Create a detailed tree with folders like “projects”, “content”, “pending requests”, “Personal”, “Group Mail”, “Performance” and so on, with the purpose of having enough folders so that NO piece of mail can’t fit one of them perfectly.

3.    Use mail rules

Even with the proper folders, moving stuff around can take a long time, so use mail rules. If you’re new to your role, take a few weeks to get acquainted with the traffic, so you can figure out what’s important and what’s not, and then create a bunch of rules. Learn the mail-rule feature of outlook (or your other mail client) and fine tune your rules so that all the junk gets moved into folders. For example, in outlook, for each rule, you can specify an exception that says “only if sent directly to me”, and that’s an effective way to separate everything that was sent to a distribution list from real correspondence you’ve been a part of. Put aside ½ hour a month to go over the rules and fine tune them too, as your group membership and topics of interest may change (for example, maybe you want less filtering during the annual review process).

4.    Store common replies

For most people, at least half our responses are virtually identical. We send the same links to people over and over, or copies of similar documents and procedures. You can save yourself a lot of time by storing common strings and reusing them (referred to as “canned response”). There are plenty of tools for that, and you can also use Outlook’s NOTES folder for that.

5.    Reply intermediately

Often times, you receive a mail, but cannot answer right away. For example, you need to put in a link that you don’t remember, or need to find more details. In those cases, get in the practice of answering something like “Hi. I got your mail, but I need to find more information to give you a proper answer. I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.” This kind of response doesn’t take more than a few seconds to write (less if you have the text stored as noted in item 4 above), but it shows the sender that you care and are attentive to his needs. Then, even if you later can’t reply at all or forget, they would be less offended than if you never replied.

6.    Direct your employees with your attention “settings”

If you are a manager, then you’re probably constantly bombarded by mail from your subordinates, CCing you on every other thing they want you to know. Naturally, most of that isn’t very relevant (not to mention the people who are just attention whores and CC you on *everything*). Instead of trying to deal, conduct a semi-annual meeting with your people, and direct them on the proper etiquette – what items to include you in, and what to keep to themselves. You might need to spend some time with yourself, trying to determine what you want vs. what you need (facing off efficiency vs. control).

7.    Mark items for follow up

When you send out an item, outlook, and most other mail clients have the option of flagging items. When you send items to people who are bad responders, or on topics that might take a while to get a response on, flag them. Then, set yourself a weekly task of going over the flagged items to see which need to be “pinged” again.

8.    Reply privately when unsure

Sometimes, we are part of a distribution list, where any member can/might reply to a certain message. Often times, we ignore these and let others reply, but that can lead to some DLs getting completely abandoned (if people see no one ever responds, they’ll look elsewhere for answers). The common reason for not answering (aside from time constraints) is being unsure of the info, but try to get used to answering the sender privately in such a case. You could say “I’m not sure about this, but in case no one else responds, I think the answer is ______”. This will be infinitely more helpful and efficient for you too rather than seeing the sender “resending” 3 more times due to no response.

9.    Wash your inbox before washing your teeth

When you wake up in the morning, spend the first 10-15 minutes of the day cleaning out your inbox from your Smartphone (I find it hard to believe anybody doesn’t have one these days). The phone is a good way to sequentially view all the new items, and the work you can get done in those 10 minutes would take you an hour if you were in the office (because office-work is always interrupted by stuff, like phone calls, meetings, people stepping in to “just say hi”…). If your phone is not convenient enough to do this easily…get a better phone!

10.  Use your phone when out

On a similar note, get yourself a phone you can actually type on, whether it be one with a physical keyboard (like a BlackBerry or the Motorola Droid Pro XT610) or one with a big-enough screen to comfortably type on (like the Nokia Lumia 9xx series or the Samsung Galaxy S series). Then, use the phone not only to read email, but also to answer the items that you can with a reasonable amount of time. A 10 minute line at the cafeteria can save you 30 minutes of mail-time when getting back to the office after lunch.

Fingerprinting for naturalization

This morning, my wife and I went to get fingerprinted as part of our naturalization process. We sent the naturalization application on Jan 3^rd, and got a confirmation letter about a week later, and a summons for the fingerprinting on Jan 17 (so, two weeks after sending out the paperwork). Surprisingly, my wife got her summons for the 24^th, while I got mine for Feb 7^th. My date conflicted with a scheduled medical procedure I had, so I decided to come with her to hers, and hope that they take me in as a walk-in (internet forum posts said it was almost always OK to do).

We live in Seattle, so our USCIS center is in 12500 Tukwila International BLVD, which is close to the Boeing museum of flight in south Seattle. We got there on time, on a Thursday in January, at 1pm, and the place was nearly empty. The building has a parking lot that charges $7 flat and appears to have plenty of room, though it’s a bit far from the building. We had the standard security sweep at the building’s entrance, and I showed the guard a Leatherman I had. He said he can’t check it for me, so he could either confiscate it, or I could take it to the car. I’m a lazy mofo, so I went out the building and hid it in the front yard, between a set of large blocks. When I went back in, the guard told me that I have to take it ALL the way to the car (remember that the lot is pretty far, incl. a huge flight of stairs and quite a bit of Seattle rain). “We have tons of security cameras around, so we could see you hide it”, she said. A tad embarrassing, but I went back and put the thing in the car. During this, the guard told my wife that most people try to hide their item 3 times on average before giving up and going to the car, so I’m at least a bit better off...

As part of the security scan, the guard asked to see our invitation paper, but didn’t notice that mine was dated differently than my wife’s, and let us both through. After passing the security scan, we went into the fingerprinting hall, where we were given forms to fill (they give you pencils, but I’d advise bringing good-quality pens with you). The forms are a simple ½ pager with name, address, A#, SSN, application number (the NBC* number given by USCIS as part of the application process) and some more generic stuff. You’re supposed to have your Green-Card with you, so the A# and most of the details were easy, but if like many people you don’t remember your SSN by heart, bring it with you. We actually didn’t remember it, but the clerk accepted the forms without it, so maybe it’s not a big deal.

With the filled forms, you go into the waiting hall, which has plenty of room, but other than the two of us, there were only about 5 people in line, so it went through in about 5 minutes. The clerk, a young woman, was nice, and when we told her I was earlier than my scheduled date because I had a conflicting medical procedure, agreed to let me in. She checked our paperwork (invitation letter, form, green card) and took a look at our hands (presumably to see if we have any skin problems or something else that would be a problem for fingerprinting) and gave us each a number. She asked us to come inside the fingerprinting room and wait.

The fingerprinting room has a row of about 8 seats, where we sat and waited our turn. I can only guess that on busy days, some people wait outside for their turn. In the back of the room, they had 4 computerized fingerprinting machines (yeah…no messy ink these days). We waited about 5 minutes for our turn and they called us in separately, as each machine has one operator that has her own queue.

At the machine, the operator (mine was a young woman, and my wife’s an older woman, who said she’s been doing this work for 11 years) sprayed water on a piece of cloth and wiped the finger scanner, and my hand. She scanned my right hand (4 fingers at once) and then my left. She then scanned my fingers individually in a rolling motion that captures more than just the front of the finger, as the flat scan did earlier. As can be expected, some of the scans were a tad blurry, so she had to redo several of the fingers, but the entire process took less than 10 minutes. After the fingerprinting, the operator took my picture (it will be used on your Naturalization Certificate, so better dress nicely, shave and make a nice face). The operator then gave me a booklet that should help me prepare for the naturalization test that I would be taking in the future (also includes an Audio CD!), as well as an extra page that alerts me to some changes in the info that’s in the booklet, following the 2012 elections. She also gave me a feedback card, which I was all too happy to tick with “excellent” on all counts. The entire adventure, from parking to getting back to the car took 40 minutes. Now we wait for the summons for the interview. The same building is also where the interview will be taking place, and it’s also where we’ll be taking the oath and getting naturalized afterwards. Some internet forum posts and friends say it would be about 2 months until then, though the processing times schedule published by the USCIS says its 5 months total. I guess we’ll have to wait and see!