It is really unfortunate that they have such an inefficient system where we cannot directly contact the responsible office. Every enquiry must be made through the call centre and what the agents typically do is kill time as much as they can. So if something goes wrong, like in my case, the applicant is made aware very late. For example, the card production stage is typically one or two weeks from what I hear from other users, but they did not take any action until my card was stuck in that stage for 6 weeks. Now they send a note and say call back in 3 months. So they drag the wait period to its maximum.
You will hopefully be fine with a bit of luck. The majority of cases do not take this long. I suggest you do not book any travel even if you think the trip is very far in the future. I landed in February and may miss my conference in September. That is about 7 months compared to the processing time of 40 days at the time. So do not make any travel plans, or otherwise you will be anxious throughout the wait period.
