I figured that applying for a Chinese visa my second time round would be much easier...nope. I haven't had to deal with the Chinese embassy yet, but I've already had technical difficulties just getting an electronic copy of my visa to CLS.
The PDF I downloaded was corrupted because random symbols plus some Russian characters would be in places I didn't type them. I didn't really think much of this since I could delete them, so I went about my business and filled out the visa as normal. When I did send it back to the people at CLS, I noticed the form had sent blank, which was embarrassing. I quickly downloaded it to make sure I sent the right one. Thankfully, all my information was there, so I breathed a sigh of relief. I didn't think much more of it until one of the representatives emailed me back stating, that, I had in fact sent a blank visa form.
Yay.
I apologized and decided it would be best if I just typed up a new visa form. When I sent the new form, they emailed me back saying it was still showing up blank, but when they clicked on the boxes where I typed in my information, they could see it. Some boxes were still blank, so they advised me to print the form at, scan it, and then resend it. (I'm just saying, printing at my school isn't the cheapest thing.)
My laptop does not like the wireless printing system, so I have to send what ever documents I need to be printed from my laptop to a computer at the print center. I guess I wasn't thinking because I just sent the corrupted PDF to myself, which obviously was not going to work. I ended up re-downloading the PDF from the Chinese embassy website and retyping everything, which, by the way, was a huge pain in the ass.
Another thing I should note is that the text boxes to type your information in are not centered, and that was really getting on my goat for some reason. I probably spent an extra half hour reformatting my visa so everything would be nice and aligned. When I was done being anal, I printed the form. Double sided. (You're not supposed to do that.)
I wasn't about to waste more money, so I decided to suck it up and go ahead and scan everything in.
Except, when I did that, I noticed some of the text boxes I used to type in the information was cut off. So, all the time I spent on formatting was for nothing. Frustrated, I tore up the visa and started over. I was then I realized that the forth page was actually good, which meant I could save money on printing. Lol jokes on me because I printed double sided, and do you know what's typically on the back of page three? Page four.
So, I spent another twenty minutes making sure that nothing would get cut off and reprinted the visa. Single sided this time. I scanned it in, but as I was doing that, I realized a significant quality drop, making the text hard to read. At this point I was ready to call it quits, but then I realized I could have taken screenshots the whole time. So three bucks later, I was aligning visa pages in a word document and converting into a PDF to send off.
After ten days of waiting and an approaching deadline with no response, I had to email them to make sure they could my original email. When they did respond, I was hoping for a thumbs up, but nope. I still had an error in my visa, which mean retyping it for a FORTH time since I did not save the editable version. For some reason, my dumbass didn't remember not to type it on my laptop, until I had completed it, which meant typing it a FIFTH time at the print center.
I really didn't want to go through the motion of screenshotting everything again, so I said yolo and saved the PDF as a new document, and it turns out that was the solution this whole time. *palm face
After one more email exchange, I was told everything looked good, and I was given the go ahead to send everything in.
And this is only the beginning. If I have to deal with everything I went through last year to get my visa, then help me god.