Haribo

I actually never wrote that.
What I wrote was "I don't think uscis would say pending consideration", and then I asked that you post what they wrote exactly - since we're all learning and all.
Good luck on your journey.

Yeah, it's pretty ###### up.
I'm just wondering what they can possibly do to make it worse for the July-October filers. Because, I'm sure they will do it.
As to why?
Possible reasons:
1. By processing Nov-Dec petitions, it gets a lot of them within their 5 month goal. If they only processed starting with the oldest pettitions, it would take a while to get to their goal.
2. Spite. "Oh, so you're complaining about the wait. Well, how does seeing all these November-December approvals make you feel? In your face!"
3. Random. I discount this reason. It is not random. They are processing November-December applications en masse . Someone chose to do this, likely for reasons 1 and/or 2.
Any other possibilities? I'd like to hear the USCIS cheerleaders opinions on this.

Oh no, not another one.

Guys... This probably comes to no surprise but this process is broke.. I think our government know this and really could care less.
I was one of those who sent a letter to Director Neufeld at the beginning of April. This past Thursday I received a response advising that, although my inquiry was appreciated, I should seek information either through the USCIS web site, calling the automated system or speaking personally with someone on the phone. Since I have done the first two I set out on a mission to speak with at minimum a Tier 2.
Mid afternoon on Friday I called in and being advised of the information by a Tier 1 I requested to speak with someone who could give me more recent answers. Surprisingly I was immediately given the opportunity, or so I thought. The Tier 1 girl advised that I could leave a message for a call back or wait in queue. I chose the queue where I was advised of a 25-30 minute wait. The wait turned to 78 minutes where someone picked up the phone, presumably a Tier 2. Then, the phone was disconnected. No thank you for calling, goodbye, etc., etc.. I could hear someone breathing and then nothing.
So I left the office and on my commute I once again called. This time pressing the immediate prompts to speak with a Tier 1. This man I told about being hung up on. Not once was a "sorry" offered he just said.. "so what do you want me to do?" (USCIS customer service at it's best) I again asked to be transferred and began my wait in line. As I was on my way to FAC with the guys I stopped off at the restaurant. Here 3 of my friends devised a plan and they also called and began to wait on terminal hold. At 5:45 our last buddy arrived and asked what we were doing and we explained. He offered up his phone. This time offering up a new possibility.
I handed him my phone, still on hold as was the other three. Spoke with a Tier 1 person. First she couldn't tell me the difference between Mountain and Pacific time.. USCIS training at its best.. Explaining the situation she advised that she understood that there have been issues but unfortunately the "system" only gave her access to see that I had an I129f submitted. Supposedly she was not even able to "see my identifiable information - name, place in process, etc." But, she did advise that I should probably request an infopass appointment (already in progress) and because of the time should probably leave a voice message. So, I was transferred to a voice mail system where upon the "beep" I was to leave my name, WAC #, call back info, etc. But at the "beep" I was informed that the voicemail box was full and promptly the phone disconnected. No chance to be retrieved into the system or recalled to a Tier 1.
I still had the 4 phones that were each in some type of terminal hold so we sat back at waited. At 93 minutes and then almost one after the other a Asian sounding woman answered my first call. First her English so poor that I could immediately tell we would have problems in understanding each other. But, after she said what sounded like "Thank you for calling the USCIS" I introduced myself.. A moment later she said "hello anyone there?" After three more attempts at communication she advised "since no one is on the telephone I am disconnecting the call." And she ended the call. Then one at a time the exact same experience was repeated on the other three phone calls. :help:
So after 5 failed attempts to speak with a live Tier 2 person at USCIS all attempts failed. I guess I have my infopass appointment on Monday which after hearing others experiences I am not hopeful there either. Monday will be 224 days of waiting. I know still many before me.. AND somehow 15 + new late November and early December petitions approved.
Has anyone else experienced this total lack of service / support? If this were the business I work for.. We would be losing tens of $1000's each day were our call center this inept.
Amazing!!

I really hate this type of condescending nonsense. If you think the USCIS's service is adequate because you happen to be friends with one of the numb skulls that runs a service center, then fine. Great for you. But to pretend like you better know how much preparation someone else has done or needs to do is just ridiculous.
Your friend is an integral part of a horribly managed system that causes a lot of unnecessary grief and confusion for the people who have no choice but to avail themselves of it. And a lot of those people are going to continue to demand better of that system, whether you or your friend like it or not. Just because he sat down and had drinks with you and told you "how it is" doesn't mean we have to accept the way he or others in the USCIS are mismanaging the system we depend upon.

Can a mod delete this thread? Either it's a troll thread or misguided advice. While patience is a virtue, relaxing gets old when people who filed at the same time and even after have their visas already. There are obvious problems with the service centers, CSC in particular and it's unfair to dub this a 'first world problem' when peoples lives an families are having to deal with this. There are people who have never seen their newborn children because of the delays, most of us will be apart from our loved ones for a year of our lives, how dare someone belittle the issue like that. If I live to 85, that's 1.2% of my life that I would have spent being unhappy because I coudn't be with my loved one. Can't imagine how it'd feel if there were kids in the equation.

But... I thought the CSC was only approving clean, easy petitions that have been frontloaded with lots of evidence, which coincidentally all happened to be from Nov-Dec?! How can this be?

And now I'm derailing the thread, but I originally fell into the same trap as you, and felt that because my relationship with my fiance was long-term and well-documented (more than five years), we'd lived together for significant chunks of our lives, and, quite frankly, he's from Canada which has got to be one of the lowest fraud countries out there (as opposed to say... Nigeria. Just saying.) that our petition would be adjudicated more quickly.
I was wrong. USCIS moves at its own pace. I find it unlikely that the reason recent July and August filers have RFEs is because we all apparently are incapable of filling out our petitions correctly. A more likely scenario is that USCIS stopped adjudicating fresh petitions, and instead approving returned RFEs and, apparently as of Monday, lucky November and December filers.
Phew, I think I need to take a break from visajourney for a while. My blood pressure is rising.
I'm sorry for cluttering up your thread, OP. Congratulations again!

Congratulations! It's true that your approval is unfair, but life's not fair, and least you can take some recourse in the fact that it's unfair in your favor this time.
Also, thank you so much for reporting your good luck on visajourney -- for earlier filers, having concrete evidence that December filers are being approved already is extremely helpful in prodding our representatives to seek action. Being able to point out why the July 18th processing date is a complete farce can only help those of us whose petitions are delayed.
I don't know the answer to your other questions.
And as for this... I'm sure it's comforting for you to seek some sort of pattern in Frandru's approval, but the fact is, if USCIS wanted quick and easy approvals, there are plenty of July-August petitions they can look to. It's not taking longer for us because our cases need extra review -- it's taking longer because USCIS is an incompetent, arbitrary organization that cares more about processing times than the people behind the petitions, whose lives are on hold indefinitely.

I would like to take a minute and use your data to show you how you are spreading incorrect information.
Recent NOA2 April & End of March 2013
No RFE from Vermont Service Center:
cornwallloz (9/24/12), annerobin12 (10/5/12), thirdtimeacharm (10/9/12), meandterry (10/1/12), XHawkeye (10/1/12) , angeleyes-gman (9/26/12), Ccyahaira (9/14/12), cheekiest (7/23/12), gm33021 (9/17/12), FinTex (10/11/12), rsz (10/22/12), Khyryke (9/20/12),
No RFE from California Service Center:
Falene (11/3/)12, asia/chris (11/28/12), dragonharrower (11/25/12), elisabethn (11/29/12), Laressa (7/20/12), mrskinne (12/6/12), Taron (12/3/12), Stevian (11/29/12), RnL (12/4/12), Chris&Maureen (8/24/12), CM&MI (8/31/12) Help from Senator, retemad (11/19/12), ChristianZane (9/12/12), res4688 (2/16/12), hkl (8/12) Expedite requested
RFE from Vermont Service Center:
JackWest (7/16/12), makii (9/10/12), XiaoyunJohnson (8/8/12), man1125 (9/10/12), StephanieChaplin (9/14/12), habibi11(7/9/12), ElenaB (7/23/12), ToniLauren (7/31/12), Saragrace (6/18/12), Francis J (8/23/12), Ibk/Ma (7/16/12), Myrlene Janvier (10/12/12), Kineo (8/2/12), bob&maegy (8/9/12), Mrs. Prince (8/10/12), Corey and Nicole (8/6/12), JM-SHE (8/9/12), elisabethanne (7/10/12), deena and joe (8/20/12), mauricio0501 (7/19/12), Gabru (9/14/12), katt_henry (9/24/12)
RFE from California Service Center: none from your list
From the list you provided, no NOA2 has come from California Service Center in which an RFE was issued.
The approvals from California include:
- 1 unfortunate couple from February 2012
- 1 from July 2012
- 3 from August 2012 (one of these members had help from his Senator, and one put in an expedite request)
- 6 from November 2012
- 3 from December 2012
This is why people are saying that the California Service Center has skipped over July through October and is now processing Nov/Dec.
The reason that ALL of the people on your list that have received NOA2 after receiving an RFE are from Vermont is because Vermont seems to be working, for the most part, in chronological order. So they sent out RFEs when they were processing July/August cases, those people have responded to the RFEs, and are just now getting the NOA2s. Please notice that without RFEs, Vermont is mostly approving September/October. Other than one VJ member from November, CSC hasn't been sending out RFEs in quite some time.
Making conclusions without understanding the data you are looking at, and then spreading those conclusions to others is irresponsible.
Usually when I see misinformation being spread, I keep to myself. However, I'm an October filer and my case is sitting in CSC...which means I have nothing but time on my hands.

Congratulations! It's true that your approval is unfair, but life's not fair, and least you can take some recourse in the fact that it's unfair in your favor this time.
Also, thank you so much for reporting your good luck on visajourney -- for earlier filers, having concrete evidence that December filers are being approved already is extremely helpful in prodding our representatives to seek action. Being able to point out why the July 18th processing date is a complete farce can only help those of us whose petitions are delayed.
I don't know the answer to your other questions.
And as for this... I'm sure it's comforting for you to seek some sort of pattern in Frandru's approval, but the fact is, if USCIS wanted quick and easy approvals, there are plenty of July-August petitions they can look to. It's not taking longer for us because our cases need extra review -- it's taking longer because USCIS is an incompetent, arbitrary organization that cares more about processing times than the people behind the petitions, whose lives are on hold indefinitely.

AArsenalteam is a moron. He should perhaps take a class in statistics before he tries to pull data analyses out of his rear end using what is likely an unrepresentative sample of the population and making assumptions about the data that are implausible. You really think that somehow due to the aligning of planets that July and August filers just didn't fill out their apps right? Was it some contaminant in the global water supply at the time that made us so stupid? Perhaps stress from following Olympic events diverted our attention away from appropriately filling out our applications?
Or maybe you're pulling reasons out of thin air. That's what's stastically more likely.

You posted the same thing in the other thread and it wasn't any more cogent there. Again, here's why you're wrong with this whole line of thinking:
Life lesson: "just facts" alone do not for cogent analysis make. Cogent analysis requires that you actually think about what you are saying and check to see if your theory of specific facts reconciles with the broader universe of known facts. You obviously have not done so.
The flaws in your analysis have been explained to you several times, so I don't hold out high hopes that this time will sink in, but here goes nothing:
1. Your theory cannot account for all of the September and October filers who have been passed over. That should be enough to stop it dead in its tracks right there. Period. End of story.
2. You are ignoring all of the pending July and August filers who have no reported RFE. (And, again, all of the September and October filers who have no RFE as well.)
3. You are ignoring the mountains of empirical evidence on this site that indicate the slow down in processing has nothing to do with file completeness and everything to do with the USCIS's priorities; i.e., there are very few adjudicator hours spent on I-129Fs due to a refocus on DACA processing. In fact, if you'd actually look at the numbers of completions per month under reasonable projection scenarios, the USCIS's current rates do not allow them to finish August filers as a matter of simple arithmetic. But what do I know? I only spent hours pouring over that data and developing a spreadsheet that proves that is true.
4. You ignore the fact that there is no way for adjudicators to know ex ante which applications are "complete" and "front loaded" and which ones are not. It makes no sense that there would be cursory examinations of applications of petitions to try and determine this, when ultimately every petition needs to be thoroughly examined and even thorough examinations take only 15-20 minutes per petition. Your processing theory would just be a gigantic waste of time.
I could go on and on and nitpick your theory more, but I think those broad points are more than sufficient. Please stop spreading your misinformation now.

Could you please stop posting your incorrect, victim-blaming "research" that is both poorly reasoned and not backed up by facts? It only adds frustration to those of us who are already frustrated, and it suggests the reason for our delays is because we've done something wrong with our petition. Moreover, what "evidence" there is for your theory is just as easily explained by the fact that in March, CSC slowed down its adjudications of fresh July-August petitions, therefore approving a higher ratio of petitions with prior RFEs.

Congratulations! It's true that your approval is unfair, but life's not fair, and least you can take some recourse in the fact that it's unfair in your favor this time.
Also, thank you so much for reporting your good luck on visajourney -- for earlier filers, having concrete evidence that December filers are being approved already is extremely helpful in prodding our representatives to seek action. Being able to point out why the July 18th processing date is a complete farce can only help those of us whose petitions are delayed.
I don't know the answer to your other questions.
And as for this... I'm sure it's comforting for you to seek some sort of pattern in Frandru's approval, but the fact is, if USCIS wanted quick and easy approvals, there are plenty of July-August petitions they can look to. It's not taking longer for us because our cases need extra review -- it's taking longer because USCIS is an incompetent, arbitrary organization that cares more about processing times than the people behind the petitions, whose lives are on hold indefinitely.

Could you please stop posting your incorrect, victim-blaming "research" that is both poorly reasoned and not backed up by facts? It only adds frustration to those of us who are already frustrated, and it suggests the reason for our delays is because we've done something wrong with our petition. Moreover, what "evidence" there is for your theory is just as easily explained by the fact that in March, CSC slowed down its adjudications of fresh July-August petitions, therefore approving a higher ratio of petitions with prior RFEs.

My concern is the posted BS July date, when they are clearly working on newer dates, and that the USCIS call centers and even Congressional liaisons are regurgitating this, and using it to keep from having to do anything.
Whether it's DACA, the wine in France, your 5th cousin, or the polar bears causing the delay in processing is irrelevant to me.

But you are proving that you have no idea what you are talking about, and you are doing so in a rather irritating way by (1) spreading misinformation and (2) tacitly insulting July and aug filers who are still waiting by implying their waits are because of errors in their files. This is baseless garbage that is not backed up by the VJ data at all. Saying it once or twice is perhaps an understandable mistake, but you have to be pretty daft and classless to keep repeating it over and over.
And, yes, those who are unduly delayed in reuniting with their loved ones due to the incompetence, dishonesty, and twisted priorities of the USCIS are victims in any sense of the word.

Congratulations! It's true that your approval is unfair, but life's not fair, and least you can take some recourse in the fact that it's unfair in your favor this time.
Also, thank you so much for reporting your good luck on visajourney -- for earlier filers, having concrete evidence that December filers are being approved already is extremely helpful in prodding our representatives to seek action. Being able to point out why the July 18th processing date is a complete farce can only help those of us whose petitions are delayed.
I don't know the answer to your other questions.
And as for this... I'm sure it's comforting for you to seek some sort of pattern in Frandru's approval, but the fact is, if USCIS wanted quick and easy approvals, there are plenty of July-August petitions they can look to. It's not taking longer for us because our cases need extra review -- it's taking longer because USCIS is an incompetent, arbitrary organization that cares more about processing times than the people behind the petitions, whose lives are on hold indefinitely.

Could you please stop posting your incorrect, victim-blaming "research" that is both poorly reasoned and not backed up by facts? It only adds frustration to those of us who are already frustrated, and it suggests the reason for our delays is because we've done something wrong with our petition. Moreover, what "evidence" there is for your theory is just as easily explained by the fact that in March, CSC slowed down its adjudications of fresh July-August petitions, therefore approving a higher ratio of petitions with prior RFEs.

Could you please stop posting your incorrect, victim-blaming "research" that is both poorly reasoned and not backed up by facts? It only adds frustration to those of us who are already frustrated, and it suggests the reason for our delays is because we've done something wrong with our petition. Moreover, what "evidence" there is for your theory is just as easily explained by the fact that in March, CSC slowed down its adjudications of fresh July-August petitions, therefore approving a higher ratio of petitions with prior RFEs.

Congratulations! It's true that your approval is unfair, but life's not fair, and least you can take some recourse in the fact that it's unfair in your favor this time.
Also, thank you so much for reporting your good luck on visajourney -- for earlier filers, having concrete evidence that December filers are being approved already is extremely helpful in prodding our representatives to seek action. Being able to point out why the July 18th processing date is a complete farce can only help those of us whose petitions are delayed.
I don't know the answer to your other questions.
And as for this... I'm sure it's comforting for you to seek some sort of pattern in Frandru's approval, but the fact is, if USCIS wanted quick and easy approvals, there are plenty of July-August petitions they can look to. It's not taking longer for us because our cases need extra review -- it's taking longer because USCIS is an incompetent, arbitrary organization that cares more about processing times than the people behind the petitions, whose lives are on hold indefinitely.

With just one day of data, I think it's too soon to panic. It could just be a blip as CSC gets in gear. I think back in Feb/early March a group of relatively recent VSC petitions were approved out of sequence. Posters hypothesized that maybe they were used for training purposes, and soon after VSC did seem to speed up. (I think. I find monitoring VSC's progress on Igor's list too depressing to do so regularly.) I would welcome a few more CSC adjudicators clearing up the backlog.
That being said, if this trend continues, I will be livid, but not surprised. CSC seems to ignore the fact that there are real people -- separated from their fiance, sometimes their children, with their lives on hold -- behind the numbers that they so readily manipulate.

With just one day of data, I think it's too soon to panic. It could just be a blip as CSC gets in gear. I think back in Feb/early March a group of relatively recent VSC petitions were approved out of sequence. Posters hypothesized that maybe they were used for training purposes, and soon after VSC did seem to speed up. (I think. I find monitoring VSC's progress on Igor's list too depressing to do so regularly.) I would welcome a few more CSC adjudicators clearing up the backlog.
That being said, if this trend continues, I will be livid, but not surprised. CSC seems to ignore the fact that there are real people -- separated from their fiance, sometimes their children, with their lives on hold -- behind the numbers that they so readily manipulate.

With just one day of data, I think it's too soon to panic. It could just be a blip as CSC gets in gear. I think back in Feb/early March a group of relatively recent VSC petitions were approved out of sequence. Posters hypothesized that maybe they were used for training purposes, and soon after VSC did seem to speed up. (I think. I find monitoring VSC's progress on Igor's list too depressing to do so regularly.) I would welcome a few more CSC adjudicators clearing up the backlog.
That being said, if this trend continues, I will be livid, but not surprised. CSC seems to ignore the fact that there are real people -- separated from their fiance, sometimes their children, with their lives on hold -- behind the numbers that they so readily manipulate.