CHAPTER 18
I VANT A WEEZA
D
uring one of my many long-term TDYs to the former Yugoslavia, I
reconnected with an old State Department friend from Washington
who was working as a visa officer in the consular section of the American
embassy in Belgrade. One night over beers at a rustic, smoke-filled Yugoslav
bar, “Joe” went on at length about his difficult but often entertaining job. He
worked tirelessly for very long hours in the understaffed and overwhelmed
visa section. As point man on the visa line, Joe had to decide who was lying
and who was telling the truth, who would come back to Yugoslavia and who
would not. He confessed to me that the working conditions were awful. The
dilapidated embassy was continually under construction, jackhammer noise
and clouds of dust sticking with employees like SDB thugs. The hordes that
crammed into the visa section’s muggy waiting room smelled bad. Many
brought forged documents. I did not envy him in the least.
Because of my Serbian language ability and immigration law experi-
ence—and because he was desperate and overworked while his American
coworker was on vacation—Joe tried to convince me to come in and help
him out for a couple of days, with his hundreds of daily nonimmigrant
(i.e., tourist) visa cases. I was busy doing my own thing and really had no
desire to spend any time at all in a workplace he described as “a cross
between the DMV at noon and the ‘ward for people who constantly shout’
at a Soviet-era psychiatric hospital.” Joe admitted that although the work
was tough, in his daily encounters with a colorful cast of Yugoslavs, he
managed to find wonderful humor in their chutzpah as they matched wits
with him in an effort to capture the elusive tourist visa.
Tempting as it sounded, I begged off, but Joe didn’t give up. Eventually,
he wore me down with his desperate pleas for help and, more importantly,
with his hilarious anecdotes from the visa section. He showed me some175