So I've been through an exhaustive ~1-year hiring/immigration process in order to acquire a work permit with a new company that wishes to hire me. All the immigration documents have been approved at this point but the process has been very difficult in terms of dealing with a 3rd party lawyer company, keeping it cool and calm despite many errors on the lawyer's and HR end. At some stages of the process, it even felt like I'm somewhat paying to get hired as they're only agreeing to reimburse some of my expenses and only after I have left my current employer, signed the contract, and started working for them. But despite that, I've never been rude or unprofessional with anyone from the company's or the lawyer's end.
Now we're close to having everything ready for me to sign the final contract (so far I've signed a 1 page offer letter that just outlined the basic things like, salary, paid days off, etc.). The HR person is pressuring me to give notice to my current employer but hasn't shown me the final contract yet. To the best of my abilities, I've explained in an email that I just need to know that nothing else is legally missing so that if I get laid off after my notice, I won't have to be unemployed for some extended period of time.
So this is an email I've sent to the HR:
Hi X,
Thanks for forwarding the expenses to Y.
Let me know once all you need on your end to finalize the contract is my start date. I'll then give my employer the 1-2 week notice.
Thanks
The reply I get is as follows, keep in mind I've been through an almost 1-year grueling hiring process that included dealing with border agencies, my current company's lawyer getting notified of my actions with another company, and all sorts of other stressful things:
The HR:
Do you need your contract to resign? I am waiting for your start date to finalize it.
I am afraid we are both waiting for each other :/
I personally found this to be very rude and offensive after all this stress, delays, and just trying to get things to work out, to get an email like that which sounds like she's annoyed about a slight delay of a day or two. From here I can only imagine what the rest of my interactions with the HR people and possibly the rest of the management will be.
Keep in mind, as it's probably obvious, that English is not my native language, so maybe I'm seeing too much into this.
Anyway, your feedback would be greatly appreciated.
UPDATE 1: this email exchange is not the first time I've been asking HR to confirm that everything else is ready and that the last thing they need is the start date. I don't feel secure about resigning if they can't confidently tell me that everything is ready on their end.
UPDATE 2: after the above email exchange, my reply was this:
"I don't need the contract to resign. What I would really appreciate, and I mentioned that during yesterday's meeting, is a confirmation that at this point there's no other obstacle in the way of getting me hired. Meaning, if I give my 1-2 week notice today and my employer decides to lay me off on spot, when I return to you with a start date of X it's all ready to go and there's no issues. So this is the only confirmation that I need and once I get that I'll give my notice to Y and return to you with a start date."
The studio manager contacted me later that, apparently, the finance department is not fully ready and best-case scenario, I can start within a week.