how to get a UK visa: a somewhat biased public service announcement

1. Go to http://www.ukvisas.gov.uk/en/ and spend an hour attempting to navigate the page. You will not be successful; this step is just to familiarize yourself with the insanity that is the UK Border Agency.
2. Fill out a massive application. Have at the ready information like your social security number, your driver's license number, all bank statement information, the name of your first pet, a brief essay on the relative merits of your personal favo(u)rite pop singer, the hexadecimal code for the color colour of your eyes, your preference re: boxers or briefs.
3. Pay the $330 application fee. This money has no discernible purpose or reasoning other than "because we can." Just do it.
4. Spend three days getting all of your paperwork together. It is not good enough; spend another day. The morning of your big biometric data appointment, race around the house in your pajamas for at least three hours. Call your dad six times to pester him at work over small but highly significant portions of your application. Print out any e-mail sent or received with the words "Oxford," "visa," or "UK" in them, just to be safe. 
5. Go for your biometric data appointment. Don't be fooled by any and all information contained on official Web sites, in e-mails and on your printed application: they lie. You should know this by now. The purpose of this meeting is to stand in a line queue in which you are the only English-speaker and then get your fingers unceremoniously mashed against a fancy-pants machine. The amount of time you spend in line will equal approximately 1000% of the time you spend with said machine.
6. Despite all assertions to the contrary and the fact that you paid a ludicrous amount for postage, these people will not mail anything for you. Carry your paperwork back home.
7. Since you've got the time again, go through your paperwork a final time. Send it off. Know that something will be wrong, but hope that it will be okay. 
8. Wait.
9. Wait more.
10. Stress out about the fact that you still haven't heard back, and that these people have your original birth certificate as well as your passport. They may be laughing at you from behind their deceptively pleasant accents, or hijacking your identity, or deliberately thwarting you because they have deemed you unqualified to study Victorian poetry. Despair slightly.
11. Wait a little bit more.
12. Receive back a curt, uninformative, and stressful e-mail from the unnamed and unreachable bureaucrats in Chicago. They will inform you that one of your documents--as you suspected--is the wrong document, and that you need to replace it. Oh, and you have three business days. 
13. Call your loan people. Get shunted from department to department. If you really want to follow my process, talk to Melanie at Federal Student Aid, Janet at State Licensing, Josh at Federal Student Aid, Lisa at Direct Loans, Roslyn at Application Services, Danielle at Direct Loans, then Chris at Application Services. None of these people will actually have a solution for you, even Chris, though he was very nice. Be prepared: Melanie and Roslyn were both rude and stupid. Yes, I wrote down all of their names.
14. Wake up the following morning at 3AM so that you can reach the UK at the beginning of the business day. You may think you will get back to sleep, but you will not. Prepare mentally for this eventuality. Station yourself far enough away from a comfortable surface (preferably standing) so that you will not just give up on your visa, England, and the whole university system and go back to bed. Trust me, it's tempting.
15. Spend a fortune on international phone calls. Get shunted once more from department to department, all the while glancing nervously at your watch and wondering just how much AT&T is going to charge you for all of this. 
16. Find the person with the least possible power who still knows something about your problem: that's the best advice I can possibly offer for dealing with bureaucratic nonsense. Get that person to overnight something to you. 
17. Wait three long days, as it is Labor Day weekend and there's no mail post on Sundays. 
18. Come Tuesday, wait anxiously for your letter to arrive. When it does, resist the urge to pee your pants in excitement; that reaction is childish and will result in a ten-minute delay in you getting to the UPS place.
19. Go to the UPS store. Overnight this document to Chicago. 
20. Think to yourself all the next day, "my document should be there by now. Shouldn't it?" Do not allow yourself to hope that this is actually the document they are looking for, as it may not be.
21. The next day, receive the most exciting one-sentence-long e-mail you have possibly ever gotten: "Your application has been approved and the visa has been issued."
22. Do a happy dance.

See? In 22 easy steps, you too can be the proud owner of a shiny, slanted yellow sticker in your passport. For the record, it's the most breathtakingly beautiful shiny, slanted yellow sticker I've ever seen.