The mystery of the missing residency card

A note on white stockings: Today on the way to the bank, I saw a woman strutting around with very sheer white stockings with a spirally pattern. She looked like she had some weird skin disease on her untanned legs. Does anyone really think walking around dressed as a skin disease is attractive? It's like people who wear skin coloured tight clothing- it just makes them look naked. Not nice.

Anyway, back to my residency card. I wrote a post back in April about the lack thereof and two weeks ago, I finally discovered what happened to it. I went to the Foreigners' Office (the 'fo I like to call it and yes it does sound, quite appropriately, like you should add a 'mo' at the beginning of it) to renew the card because you need to do it every year. The guy at the office, who was quite nice, asked me for my old one so he could photocopy it, to which I replied that I never received it.

He looked at me horrified and asked 'But what did you do when the police stopped you in the street?'

'The police, um, have never stopped me in the street.'

He scurried away to the back office and presently returned with an envelope and his manager/senior. Apparently they'd sent it to the wrong address because back in 2006, more than two years ago, I lived in the same street, but at a different number and they never bothered to check if I'd changed address. Which I had, and which I'd written on the form. And the kind person who lived at my old address had returned the letter to sender. And the manager/senior had the gall to ask my what I was so busy with that I hadn't bothered to come in to check the status of my card. To which I indignantly replied that I'd been several times and every time, they'd told me there was a delay and it would be ready soon. And by then it was almost time to renew my card anyway, so there was no point.

The woman was like 'Well, we sent it to you. Look, here's the date stamp.' Obviously it doesn't matter that they sent it to the wrong address. They could send it to Mongolia and it would be my fault if I didn't receive it.

So. I am now awaiting my renewed card. Fingers crossed for that one.

PS The good news is, you need to pay an admin fee on the pickup of the card and since I never picked it up, I didn't have to pay it.