Friday, May 02, 2008

Dealing with the Colombian embassy

Over the past two days, I've been trying desperately to get some information on travel requirements for entering Colombia on business. Do I need a visa, for example? What effect does my citizenship have? And so forth. Their various websites have been extremely unhelpful in this regard, and the main telephone line at their closest location greeted me with a long and unhelpful automated message.

I finally got ahold of someone this morning. The person who answered the telephone could barely speak English. Perhaps there was some reason for this, so I won't judge the situation too harshly; however, it seems to me that if you're managing a consulate within the USA, you'd want to employ people who can speak English pretty well. (Again, I recognize that I don't know the whole story here.)

She referred me to another person who had to ask around to get the information I needed. At one point, she referred me to the consulate's website -- but she had to ask her co-workers what the website URL was. Again, I thought that was a bit strange. (Unless she's a brand new employee, I find it hard to understand how someone would fail to know what their website address was.)