Follow-up to Iran's financial situation

When I was coming to US about 5 months ago, I didn't have any funding. So, being able to exchange currency at a lower price was important for me. Iranian government offers students studying abroad a limited amount of currency exchange through its banks that are slightly cheaper than other exchangers. Of course, by the time I was leaving the country, the amount of dollars that were being dealt in Iran was minimal and the only way to be able to get any was through the banks.

However...they require you to leave the country, go register at the university, and then make an online folder where you upload basically almost every degree you got from the time you were born! And eventually they may or may not accept in the end! They make you jump through hoops for nothing! They want you to get tired and be eliminated from the race!

I made the folder as soon as I got here and got my certificate of attendance from the university and uploaded it and my mom (who was here at the time) took it with her to DC so that the Iranian embassy (since Iran doesn't have an embassy in the US, it is actually the Pakistani embassy!) to be signed and approved, and then she took it with her to Iran. By the way, I even put my home address in the US on my attendance sheet because the Iranian government wants to make sure that you are reaaallyyy at the place you are claiming to be!

Anyway, they replied to my request like 3 months after my initial request was submitted and they said that it was refused because the attendance form I had submitted was not signed by the Pakistani embassy. Ok, maybe it was my fault just a bit but then I checked the website and saw that where it asked to upload the attendance sheet, it didn't says anything for it to be the one signed by the embassy.

I told my mom about this and she sent the form to Tehran to the Ministry of Health, that makes the decision on this, and they said that you can't submit the form by person and it needs to be submitted online! I said ok then scan the form and email it to me so I can upload it online. After my parents emailed it, I went online and saw that their system was down...and it continued to be down for a week! You can imagine how frustrated I was. Why would you ask everything to be submitted online when you don't have the technology?! AAAAAAAGH!

After a loooong time when I could log on again, I submitted the form. They didn't reply and it said that the deadline was February 20. So I sent them an email and asked them to expedite replying to my request. And they did. It was refused again. And guess why?! This time for two reasons! First of all, they asked for the new semester's certificate of attendance, so that they would make sure that I am still in the US! I wanted to ask WHY?! Even if I was back, I had paid for the whole semester myself and I wanted to be able to use the small financial benefits that they were graciously giving us! And it wasn't like the whole thing was going to be free for me. I was still paying for everything! But maybe at a lower rate.

And you wouldn't belieeeeve how stupid the second reason was. Guess what?! They had just added another line to the files to be uploaded: the ranking of the university you are attending. Really?! Are you kidding me?! You can't do that yourself?! They had even provided the website that I was supposed to get the ranking from. Couldn't you have just typed in the name of my school there yourself?!!!!

GOOOOOOD!

It is the same thing for every official work you have to do in Iran...whatever that involves paperwork and bureaucracy. Take my graduation for example. After graduation I had to do some paperwork to get my degree. I went to the office and there was this disgusting guy who was "religious" and instead of looking at my face, so that he wouldn't be looking at an opposite sex's face, he was staring at my chest and was telling me to rearrange my scarf so that my hair wouldn't show! How the F did you see my hair if you weren't looking at my face you pervert! Oh...this wasn't what I wanted to tell you. He told me that they needed something from my department. I went back to my school and told them that I needed that document. Then went back to the pervert's office. Then he told me that I needed to bring another document from my department too! Why the hell didn't you tell me this in the first place?! I was going all this way back and forth for some papers and documents that I could have gotten all at the same time! But because they forgot or didn't care for our time or whatever the reason they had, they would send us back to get something and drag us back there.

And what made me write this post was this news I heard yesterday. Iran's $40m oil rig sunk in the Persian Gulf upon installation! (poker-face!) I am sitting here, looking for a little financial aid, so that instead of like 400 million Rials (equivalent to $10,000) I would pay 250 million Rials, and they are building a 40 million dollar rig and the work they have done is so bad that it is sunk even before they can use it!

Here's the video:

Iran's new oil rig drowning