As a reporter you are used to forcing your way through bureaucracies - switchboards, jobsworths, spokespeople - and sorting out muddles quickly, writes Patrick Barkham. You are also fairly familiar with dramatic situations and tend not to get affected by other people's emotion.
But none of these experiences prepared me for the day I spent with a family of asylum seekers from Malawi, who were due to be deported from Britain last night.
Four months ago Verah Kachepa and her children Natasha, 20, Alex, 17, Tony, 16, and Upile, 11, were ordered to report to Heathrow Terminal 4 at 6pm yesterday for a scheduled 8pm flight to Malawi via Kenya. The family are lucky: they have incredible support from their home town of the last five years, Weymouth, and, with immigration officials making no move to meet the costs of deporting the family, church groups hired a mini-van and drove them to west London last night.
They arrived at the airport at 5.30pm, parked, and had the kind of emotional goodbyes with their friends that would melt the heart of the hardest critic of the principle of asylum (and has: Ann Widdecombe is among those who have pleaded with the government to let the Kachepa family stay in Britain). They were inside the terminal well before 6pm.
There were no immigration officials to meet the family and give them their confiscated passports and tickets. It didn't seem the government – desperate to boost its statistical "success" rate for deporting asylum seekers - was particularly bothered whether the family deported themselves or not.
The Kachepas are also lucky because they have savvy middle-class supporters who are confident in dealing with authority. As the family queued up, their supporters were shunted between the check-in desk, the airline ticket desk and a telephone on the wall by the (closed) immigration department in an attempt to find the family's passports and tickets.
One supporter was told by the phone on the wall to "wait there". He waited for nearly 45 minutes and was finally told that the ticket desk held all the paperwork. He returned to the ticket desk to be told immigration had them. At one stage I intervened to try to find a real, walking, talking, immigration officer - but I couldn't track one down either. The bureaucracy was impenetrable.
Eventually, 15 minutes before the Kachepas' flight was due to depart, a flustered official appeared with the travel documents. It was too late: Kenya Airlines had closed the departure gates. "Will you sign this piece of paper to say the Kachepas were here, waiting to be deported?" asked one supporter. "No I will not," said the official and stormed off.
The Kachepas were left in the crowded terminal building without any kind of official explanation about what they should do next or why immigration had not produced their passports and tickets on time. Officialdom just melted away.
Luckily, again, the Kachepas had their supporters, who drove them all the way back to Weymouth again.
Imagine being a teenager being ordered out of a country you have made your home for the last five years. You are desperate to stay but you obey authority, packing up your home and saying your goodbyes to all your friends. Then you are left in limbo like that.
The Home Office said today they were still conducting an "investigation" into why the Kachepas did not leave on the flight. As if the family were to blame.
Back in Weymouth, the family are wondering when they will be released from this no-man's land. They still desperately want to stay but know they are at the mercy of a labyrinthine - and apparently heartless - bureaucracy.
It was such an emotional day that I was glad it was over. But barring the miraculous intervention of the immigration minister (Charles Clarke, the home secretary, is on holiday), the Kachepas will almost certainly have to do it all over again.
