Yay I Finally Have A Goddamn Work Permit

My visa situation here is finally resolved, but (for posterity's sake, and before I completely block out all the gory details) I would like to record the entire, painful, tooth-jerking process.

• January 9: My tourist visa has about a month left and I take a day off of school (where I have already been working since October) to try and sort things out at the immigration office. Immigration office is in León, an hour away, and I don't have a car. Yay bus. Get to León, taxi driver rips me off. Get to immigration office (which is only open from 9am to 1pm on weekdays minus national holidays) and wait. By the time they give me the forms I need to fill out myself and use to pay at the bank, it's too late to be able to give them a completed application that day.
• January 16: Go back to León and submit completed paperwork.
• February 3: Go back to León and am informed that I need to give them some kind of document (description of document is intentionally vague), internationally certified, and officially translated to Spanish (ie stamped by someone who took the government certification course or whatever) to show them that I am qualified to teach English. And I have 10 business days to do so. I freak out, since I have none of the above.
  
• February 5: My mom gets my high school diploma and transcript certified to stall the office as I try and figure out how the hell it's possible to get my college transcript certified when Canada doesn't do the international certification procedure.
• February 17: 10 business days after the freakout begins, I go back to León and submit the documents my mom sent down, I translated, and the director of the language school at the University of Guanajuato stamped.
• March 13: I didn't want to go back to the immigration office until I was sure that my internationally certified college transcript was on its way down here. This took about a month, and is its own horror story. In the meantime, turns out, my high school transcript was enough, or the immigration office just wanted something with a shiny seal and didn't bother to read what I submitted. My change-of-migratory-status is approved. But do I have my new immigration documents? Of course not! They give me new forms to fill out, a new fee to pay, and a sheet of paper with a new list of requirements.
• March 20: New paperwork submitted.
• March 30: Previously, I had been told that my file would be definitively reviewed by this day, so I shuffled around my kids' week-before-vacation English tests and was at the immigration office when it opened. It was, in fact, not definitively reviewed, and not there. I freak out for many reasons, but mostly frustration with the whole goddamn process, and start crying in the immigration office. Nobody seems to care.
  
• April 3: Return to the immigration office. Everything is there, signed. The lady behind the counter, very archly, looks at me and says that I didn't need to make a big drama out of the whole thing.

On average, I waited at the office about an hour each time I had to go. It varied, from as little as 15 minutes to as much as 3 hours, but I was prepared to wait at least an hour every time I stepped foot in that godawful boring waiting room.

I would like to point out that this heinous process will have to be repeated, because it took me 3 months to get a visa that is only valid for one year.