The Saga Continues

As many of you may have heard, I'm in a bit of a fix concerning my visa for Spain. For those of you unaware, let me re-cap:
First I shall start by explaining that in order to get a visa for Spain one must apply in person at the nearest consulate; for us Washingtonians that just happens to be San Francisco. But before even going to the consulate you must have an assortment of documents (in a specific order and presentation) even to think about making an appointment. Among those being your passport, clean bill of health, absence of police record (with the official state seal called and Apostille of the Hague-what ever) and a letter from the school in Spain saying that they have accepted you for the position. Needless to say, by the time I had all these documents in place the soonest appointment I could get was for August 3rd.
The appointment itself seemed to go without a hitch. I had a lovely trip to San Fran and enjoyed myself tremendously. When I asked the guy doing the paperwork if my visa would be ready by Sep. 9th when I was leaving for N.Y. he assured me that he had the date on the application and gave me a number to call in case I hadn't gotten it a week before I was to leave- I should have figured it out then.
So a week before I was about to leave and still no visa (remember that they have my passport too). I call the number the guy had given me but oddly enough it just transferred me to a voice mail which was full- well that was no help. I then proceeded to call the various numbers for the consulate; yet experienced the same phenomenon- full voice mail boxes and no real people. On the off chance that I did get the one receptionist fielding calls for the entire northwest region, they were curt, uninformative and ended in being transferred to one of those black hole voice mails. I discovered how difficult it is to defend and assert one's self in another language, above all over the phone. After a few days of this it got pretty old to say the least. E-mailing was out of the question as well since their e-mail was suffering from the same gluttonous state as the voice-mail. I began taking to faxing but to no avail. In a desperate panic I called my state representative's office only to get, "wish we could help but the Spanish consulate isn't part of the US government so there's nothing we can do." I got similar responses when I tried to call the main consulate in WA DC, "Sorry, but you're out of our jurisdiction." Even the people in my program are unable to penetrate the web of Spanish consulate. Now I'm in N.Y. and am supposed to leave for England less than a week!!!! I have a few choice words I'd like to share with the consulate- if I could only get a hold of them!
Well, wish me luck; that's about the only thing I've got going for me at the moment.