I was thinking about this last night, and here is where I think the whole Memphis USCIS timeline is unfair. Your fingerprints expire 15 months after they are taken, right? So Memphis takes 6-8 weeks to get to your paperwork and they find a problem. They send you a request for more information which you supply to them and you go back to the bottom of the stack- add another 6-8 weeks. (3-4 months)
China is running at 9-10 months for referral and about 2 months to travel. This puts you right at the 15 months until your fingerprints expire, so there is another couple hundred dollars and a 600 mile round trip drive to Nashville. I don’t believe people going through other offices are going to experience this, as either their wait time is less, or if more information is needed and supplied it doesn’t seem that they are placed on the bottom of the list- they are reprocessed in a week or two.
I don’t understand how Officer Williams gets by setting her own rules and doing as she pleases- she must have a supervisor who just doesn’t give a damn.