Immigration Officers - Don't You Just Love 'em?

Do they train these people to be as stupid and ignorant as possible or are they just born that way?


So we arrive in Jo'burg - it had been a long flight and we still had to get down to Cape Town, but if you enter the country at Jo'burg that is where you go through immigration, we walked into the immigration hall and separated - Mrs Dubai is South African, I'm not. Mrs Dubaibilly joins a queue of about 30 to 40 people for which there were 12 immigration officers - very efficient I hear you say. I join a queue of about 3 to 4 hundred people and how many immigration officers did we have? Four. They had a single queue system - until you got to the front and then it changed into 4 separate queues, one for each immigration officer - unbelievable. I joined a particular queue and got to second place in that only to have a roving immigration officer (who's job appeared to be to cause chaos) inform me that I was queueing in the wrong place and demand that I queue up like everyone else - even though I'd spent about three quarters of an hour getting to where I was - I joined one of the three remaining queues behind several people who should have been behind me and she seemed satisfied.

Leaving the country was just as bad:

We joined a queue, at a particular point me, Mrs DB and about 5 other people where told by and immigration official to "Come this way please", "I don't have a Diplomatic passport", "It doesn't matter, come this way!" OK we went that way, walked to the little box and another roving immigration official said "Do you people have Diplomatic passports?". "No but we were sent this way". "No you weren't, go back and join the queue".

How do you deal with people like this? This is the country that is going to have several hundred thousand football fans from all over the world descend upon it in June 2010 for the World Cup and they can't handle a little queue. Perhaps some serious training is required in between now and then!