Foreign and Commonwealth Office dealings

Today I went to the British Embassy here in Prague and I think they achieved the quite remarkable feat of infuriating every single person they dealt with.

I have come not to expect great things from the Prague embassy - this is after all the people who employed a former StB (Czechoslovak version of the KGB) agent just after the Velvet Revolution - hurray for the vetting process.

All I needed to do was post a Notice of Marriage and get an apostille for my birth certificate. The Notice of Marriage was simplicity in itself, but the apostille turned out to be something of a nightmare. By getting the Embassy to organise it it was going to cost 3000 CZK (approximately 100 GBP), of which 30 GBP was the actual fee and the rest to get it sent by diplomatic post. They told me at the embassy that this process would take 7 weeks! But if I posted it myself, along with payment details and so on, it would take 4 weeks and I save myself 70 GBP. So I rang the FCO in London to make sure that everything was correct - having been recommended by the embassy to "check with them because they know better" - and low and behold I get an automated phone system.

Is it any wonder that people feel disconnected from politics and dealing with governments when those very same bodies have disconnected themselves from us by hiding behind automated phone services? I just want to spend two minutes on the phone clarifying a couple of things, but for my "convenience" I have to listen to a useless recorded message, and when finally forwarded to an operator, I get an answering machine which just hangs up.

So my total paperwork costs for the wedding are around 150 GBP, compared to my fiancee paying about 60 GBP for the very same documents - she is American, America looks after its people, while it seems Britain hoses its for money.

Surely in this day and age with technology as it is, it is hardly rocket science for an embassy to do apostilles in situ - or is it just Britain that likes to makes life difficult for its people?