I used to work in recruitment for a large Qatari Organisation and whenever a candidate (either transferring sponsorship or moving from overseas) would ask me how long would the process take, I would always answer -how long is a piece of string? It used to annoy the hell out of them but I refused to be pinned down to an actual time frame as I know what it is like here with the authorities.

Nevertheless, I still used to get constant gripes that I was to blame for the delay - c'est la vie, you can't fix stupid