Never a dull moment, NOT

Friday, April 6, 2007 | 7:17 a.m.

Imagine you work in human resources.

(This isn't most people's idea of a Walter Mitty fantasy - adventure! excitement! managed health care enrollment forms! - but play along anyway.)

So you're a human resources specialist. And you're really specialized. One thing you spend a lot of time on is getting employees home on their vacations. Only home is in S ao Paulo, Brazil, or Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia.

See? Adventure! Excitement! OK, really, it's more paperwork.

"That," Jason Morrison says, "has been the bane of my existence."

Morrison works for Cirque du Soleil, and his work is immigration. Just immigration, because about 300 of Cirque's 425 performers are not U.S. citizens, the U.S. not being one of the leading producers of circus artists. (Cirque's human resource department offers English language courses and helps artists find housing as well as the usual HR department functions.) Each of the five shows generates more than 100 visa requests a year, and Morrison helps performers fill out forms and make appointments.

It's usually easier to get people out of the U.S. than back in .

Take the case of Reinaldo Noguti. Most of the year, he's in Las Vegas, working in "Ka" as an acrobatic dancer, which means in the early part of the show he's captaining a doomed ship and later he's a blue-and-green-painted jungle warrior who swings on vines and battles tattooed bondage-fetishist rock 'n' roll bad guys (or whatever they are). He's been here for three years and he just bought a house, so he plans on hanging around for a couple more. He likes it OK, it's a crazy place, a bit too much, but he likes the job, and all the best shows are in Las Vegas. Very different from home.

Noguti's family is in Brazil, and he's a Brazilian citizen. He likes to use at least some vacation to visit his family. This is difficulty No. 1 of 3.

When Noguti goes home for a visit he has to get a U.S. visa to return, and the U.S. and Brazil have been, for various reasons (mostly of the he-hit-me-first variety), slapping each other with travel restrictions. So now Noguti has to make his visa appointment at the U.S. Consulate in S ao Paulo at least three months in advance. His vacation lasts two weeks. You can schedule your visa application appointment in advance but then there's Problem No. 2.

The U.S. Consulate in S ao Paulo has a reputation for embodying the finest customer service traditions of, say, the phone company. Or the DMV. As imagined by Kafka after eating bad schnitzel. He can make the appointment in advance, but there's no guarantee that Noguti's appointment won't be canceled, rescheduled, canceled again, rescheduled again, filed in triplicate and stuck under a leg of a wobbly desk. So Noguti's vacation might be longer than he had planned, something that can happen again in Problem No. 3.

Morrison always advises Cirque's artists to answer an airport immigration officer's questions politely, concisely and honestly. And to hope the officer isn't having a bad day, because he can throw you in detention.

Or, as Noguti found out in bonus Problem No. 4, sometimes an immigration officer is having a really good day.

Noguti doesn't just like to visit his family in Brazil, he also likes to use part of his vacation to travel around Central and South America. But the U.S.-entry visa he gets in Brazil is no good if he's not coming from Brazil, as he found out when he tried flying in from Costa Rica. No, no, no, the immigration officials said, he needs to go to back to Costa Rica and get a visa there, or go back to Brazil and then come back to the U.S. This will not do at all.

But as the officer was questioning Noguti, it came out that Noguti is a Cirque du Soleil performer. The officer had once seen a Cirque show. He loved it! They chatted for a while about the shows, the costumes, the acrobatics. Things got very friendly. Finally the officer decided he was going to be a nice guy and cut Noguti a break on the visa.

So he fined him only $280.