Wow, lucky you! Congrats!
Question for those that have been around here a while. How can this be? The way I see it, there are 2 explanations....
1) This is a completely random process and they don't process them in any kind of order
or
2) There is a problem with the applications that were received before this one, causing them to be skipped over
What am I missing?
It's probably neither.
Over the last few months, Sheffield have had a habit of processing some applications quickly towards the end of the month in order to make their monthly processing statistics look better.
This happened in July and August as well... there was a flurry of decisions and applications processed really quickly right before the end of the month, even though other people had been waiting for weeks for their decision.
Also, it's not uncommon for some applications to take longer than others anyway, for any number of other reasons:
1) each ECO is likely to have been given a pile of applications to work through and some may get through theirs faster than others
2) a particular ECO might go on holiday or be off sick, meaning their pile of applications might not be worked through as quickly as someone else's, or they might be assigned to a different ECO who has other applications to work through first
3) there may be a complicated application in your ECO's pile that takes longer to process, meaning it takes them a longer to get to yours.
4) if an application requires more documents or further looking into, it's likely to be put to one side while they wait for the documents/further checks, so they will likely process applications that arrived later in the mean time.
