You Just Keep Thinking That

Only a slight annoyance?

Since I didn't get a response from CIS about whether we really needed to go get fingerprinted for a third time, I decided that I wasn't going to slow down this process by waiting on them for a response. This morning, we went down to the same fingerprint location where we've gone the last 2 times.

The first time, in June 2005, I seem to remember taking a while. The last time, in September 2006, was quick. It lulled me into a false sense of .... something. Anyway, today we got there just before 11am. They are open on Saturdays 8-2. We were given our numbers. Allen was 611, & I was 612. 11am - They're on 595. That doesn't seem too bad. 12 noon, they're on 610. Not bad, not bad.... 1 pm - They're on 610. Bad. Very bad. Apparently, and I can't necessarily prove this, at 12 noon, everyone in back that was doing the fingerprinting went to lunch. Sure when their lunch hour was over at 1, there was only another hour that the office was open, but darn if they didn't enjoy that full lunch hour anyway!

Like I said, I can't prove they all went to lunch, but they didn't call a single person back during that hour. We, of course, were not allowed any food or drink while waiting. 1pm comes around, they start calling numbers again. Nobody in the chairs waiting in the back for printing. They call enough numbers to fill up the chairs. There were 2 people working/waiting to start taking prints. Allen mentioned to his guy the seeming lunch break and of course his guy said nobody took a lunch break. Of course over the course of the 15 minutes we were getting printed, 4 or 5 employees came in with to go cups looking like they'd gone to lunch and a few of them went "back" to work.

I know people gotta eat. Heck, I was pretty hungry myself! It would have been nice if they had just come out and said, "Hey look, we're not going to work for an hour. If you want to walk next door and grab a bag of chips and eat it outside, you're not going to get skipped." But for some reason, I guess they thought we wouldn't notice.

So we finished there around 1:30. Somehow.

Then, we went to eat. I could have eaten our table, and almost thought I was going to have to. For about 10 or 15 minutes we thought we were eating at an establishment where everyone was taking a lunch break. Long story short, we ended up with a floor manager and 2 waiters looking after us. Low blood sugar makes me, uh, assertive.

Anyhoo, what a day. Now there can be no delay with CIS processing our documents - unless of course they happen to be reading this.