Immigration Blues Continued

Spent the day at the Immigration office in Butterworth yesterday with my two children trying to get things done with regards to thier visas. According to his passport my son has less than a week in this country and unless something is done he will have to leave the country and go home to the United States. This was the result of our visit to thye Thai border the day before to get his Passport stamped and validated for three months. But it was not meant to be, the immigration officer at the border decided that he had had enought of it and decided that we take care of this matter once and for all at the Penang Office so that we do not have to keep crossing the border every three months to legalize my son's stay in Malaysia.
I agree with this decision and decided to take action immediately getting both my children to fill up the forms for application to become permanent residence in the country as they by now i am sure more than qualify for it if not the right to become a citizen of this country. Now the the window hopping and paper chase begins as we were sent from one department to another and had i given up without insisting on seeing the Director of Immigration to present my case i would have no knowledge of what is going on. Fortunately after seeing the secretary to the Director not even the Director yet i was again sent from window to window untill I got to the right department. Here the collecting of information begins all over again but I still did not have the very first passport for my son which indicated when he actually entered the country which was more than ten years ago in 1998. And so today i ahve to take a drive with my son again to get the process moving. The officer in charge was fortunately very calm and relaxed about the whole thing despite the fact that it makes little sense for the department not to have any back up data on my son after all these years of residing in the country and going back and forth across the Thai border in the past year, you'd think that by now the immigration department should have dossier on him and for his sister too for that matter. What is the computer for? Why keep feeding the information into it when you cannot acess for the information when you neeed it and keep adding more work than necessary? But hey, never quesion the authority especially when you are at their mercy. If you are told to come back with the old passport you just do it even if it will cost another half a tank of gas and 7RM for the bridge on the way back. Indeed Allah is Merciful if inspite of all these i could get my children's visas problems resolved.