So my friends the penultimate chapter in my pursuit, not of Happiness (with an I, Will Smith, with an I, not a Y!) but of Citinzeness is completed as of this morning. I had to go get my fingerprints done by Immigration or as I like to call it, The Service. The new name for INS never caught on by the way. Who the hell is going to remember USCIS for United States Citizenship and Immigration Service, Homeland Security? INS made sense and was very close to IRS and part of the culture. USCIS just sounds like a college...
Last time they fingerprinted me was like a minute ago. Really what could I have done since then? And if you've never gone, you don't know, but this ain't your momma's fingerprinting. This is a state of the art FBI thing that involves a fat lady rooooooooooling each invidual finger of yours onto a glass pad, and waiting for the computer to tell her that the picture is okay. If there are interruptions in the picture, like cracks, she has to do it again. Sometimes the cracks are because you have dry skin, in which case, she has to give you lotion and look at you fucked up like you farted at her or something. Sometimes the lady is mean and really squeezes your finger hard when doing it or yells at you for no reason. The lady's job is really dumb right? So generally she also routinely has to act like YOU are dumb and like YOU don't know how to do this thing. So she'll say things like "no ma'am" "stop it, stop it, stop it", "move over here, (sigh), NO here, you're standing in the wrong place", etc.
This would all be well and good if I was actually DOING something-anything at all-but I'm not, bitch, you are the one holding my thumb and rolling it on your computerized glass pad cause that's your dumbass job that's pissing you off and I would have sympathized but turns out you're a bitch so fuck you. I say "the lady" generically because they truly are all the same lady. Pissed off and mean clones of each other. The lady made a face like there's bad milk in the fridge to say the usual, "What the-where IS IT that you're from again?!". I'm used to this one so I don't even care: "Cape Verde". "Whaaaaat?". "CAPE.VERDE. Like Cape Cob but Verde and in West Africa, under C in the scroll down menu there". "Oh, thanks. Never heard of it." Bitch you ain't never heard of a lot of things like knowing when to shut the fuck up and not make a stinky face when you don't know geography. Like it's my fault that I was not born in Ethiopia or South Africa, the only two African nations you know, courtesy of the Bible and Oprah respectively. Oh snap, that was racist!
Speaking of racist, let me tell you about the perversion of The Service.
This is always observed whenever you deal with them and it is the number one reason your ass wants to never deal with them again: the immigration service is populated exclusively by the biggest assholes in America. I mean people who refuse to say please and thank you. People who yell at adults. People who treat everyone as a mentally retarded person when 9 out of 10 times, they are the densest, dumbest motherfuckers in the room. People who talk like they have a hearing impediment combined with tourettes:
"Ma'am you're not not listening to me. Ma'am. Ma'am. Ma'am. No. No. No.Stop. No. No", is typically what they say to you while you are trying to explain something to them. That's never possible. You can't explain. You have to bring the right paperwork and that's it. If you don't have the shit in your hand you get the line above. Generally without eye contact. These people are truly foul and make you feel like an extra in the movie "Amistad" the moment, and I mean the moment you walk into the building. Today when I walked into the building, I mean literally the glass doors opened and I took one step and reached inside my pocket and the security yelled.
"Ma'am the line starts HERE."
"Uh, I just walked in and was just..."
"The line is HERE. Not THERE. HERE"
"...taking out my cell phone..."
"Ma'am, sign says NO CELL PHONES"
"...to turn it off. Why are you yelling?"
"THE LINE Ma'am. THE LINE"
"(Silence.)"
Silence you say? Why did you not curse him out? That's a stupid natural born citizen question to ask. These are the Feds. Not just the federales but the migra. You don't say shit to them. My asking why he was yelling was me not thinking clearly because I had no coffee. Usually you just think "yes massah" in your head and smile humbly when the abuse happens. If it merits that you cry, you cry. But you don't talk back to the Service. No, no, no. Because you lose an appointment and your ass is toast. You can't leave the country and you can't do shit until another appointment is set-up. So you take their shit. Which they know you will, which is why they do it.
The perversion thickens though. Because a) all of this 21st Century slave ship strife occurs under a neverending succession of photos of Bush and Cheney. Like yearbook pictures of these fools, everywhere. Grinning. In front of the flag. Dude, come on: is this Dante's Immigration Service? Must you torture us for your amusement? But the worse perversion is of course the fact that the asshole personnel is all "of color", and "foreign origin", usually who speak with the thickest accents and come from places where customer service as a concept is well, *not* a concept. Places like my homeland, for instance. This is perversion to the point of scary-brilliant. Because on the one hand, this racist circus is populated by non-whites, thus the immediate harshness and fuckedupedness is masked by being delivered by "your own" to you (an old, very familiar colonial administration model by the way, 200 yr old United States-you ain't doing shit to us we've all not seen before!).
But, on the other hand, this chorus of barely intelligible English coming out of the mouths of extremely rude and unhelpful immigrants really works well to enforce any racist customer's predisposed antipathy towards...well, immigrants and people with accents. It is a bonus that while these two rabbits are killed with one shot, a third rabbit gets it too, because we the immigrants truly develop a profound comtempt for those of us who work for immigration and partake in this fucking travesty. The whole time you're sitting there, putting up with abuse, watching people putting up with probably worse abuse, hearing insulting behavior, you just want to go up to one of the sistahs and the bwethas and say WHAT THE FUCK IS YOUR PROBLEM?! (And why do you already have papers and I don't bitch?!). But if you did that you know the Klansman who runs the Service and still wears the white sheet to work would come out of his back end office and... cancel your appointment for that day and send you back to the automated appointment system. And that would be fucked up.
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