A tale of EPic proportions

I got my Singapore Employment Pass yesterday.

It had been in the works for quite a while, of course, but the deal wasn't finalized until yesterday. We received the requisite letter about two weeks ago, but the boss reminded me that I needed to go get a physical exam at a local medical clinic. I went off to the clinic to do so, only to read the fine print on the way there and discover for the first time that I did not need a physical. Apparently that is usually a requirement but it wasn't in my particular case for some reason. With that out of the way, I settled on Monday to set aside an afternoon to sit in the consulate waiting for my number to be called.

Monday came, I waited, and finally got to the desk with all my papers. The lady behind the desk said everything was there except the "white card" from immigration that I needed to fill out when I got off the plane. Nobody had told me up to that moment that I would ever need that card again, naturally. Luckily, that's just the sort of thing I have learned never to throw away, so I found it in my desk that night and then headed back to the immigration ministry on Tuesday. This time, another lady behind the same desk told me that I also needed my certificate from Yale. I had the HEC one with me and I thought I also had the Yale one, but I didn't.

That's where things start to get interesting. I went home and couldn't find a hard copy of the diploma translation anywhere, but I did have a scan of it saved. So yesterday morning I came to the office just long enough to print out the scan, hoping they'd accept a copy.

They did, but there was definitely a communication breakdown along the way. When I got to the desk, yet another woman took a look at the translation and asked me for my certificate.

"That's an official translation of it," I told her.
"No, this isn't a certificate."
"The diploma isn't in English. That's the official translation."
"We don't need a diploma, we need a certificate."
"What exactly do you mean by 'certificate' if it's not a diploma?"
"It's a...certificate!"

Now, I never did learn quite what she thought a certificate was. When I made it clear that I had no idea what she wanted, she told me to wait and went back to speak to someone or other in the back office. When she returned, she asked me to write on the copy where the original was and sign it. I wrote, "Original diploma is in USA and is not in English."

She looked at it. "USA, does that mean France?"

I'm not joking. Neither was she. Nearly everybody in Singapore speaks English fluently. Leave it to one of the few who don't to end up in a job that involves dealing with people in English all the time!

Nevertheless, the papers were processed at that point and I got the EP later on yesterday afternoon with no further troubles. I think she may have been confused by the fact that I had one degree from an English speaking country and one from a non-English speaking country, but the latter correspondence was in English in the original while the former wasn't. (In keeping with Yale's deliberate pretentiousness about almost everything, its diplomas are in Latin. This is not the first time that has gotten me caught up in red tape.) I doubt she ever quite caught on to my situation, and I still haven't got a clue what the difference between a certificate and a diploma is.

It was still a lot easier than it was in France!