Wednesday, October 03, 2007

Why I NEED this Blog

The whole fingerprinting experience was classic. And I only endured her wrath and ugliness because each step of the process gave me more and more material for this blog and I kept thinking to myself, "Oh this is GREAT blog fodder." "Oh my goodness, I can't wait to share that." "This is going to make my readers crack up". And I kept holding on to that until it was finally over.

On the way there I made a mistake and opened my mouth and obviously the very utterance of my voice "pisses her off." So she is remarking how she is not sorry about anything and how everything is my fault and as I'm leaving the van to head in and deal with her fingerprinting she flips me off. We get into the first set of doors and everything is confusing. There are signs, and panels and a phone receiver. She stares at me. I hand her the sheet and say, "You can handle this on your own if you are going to be so rude to me." So she looks around. Reads all the signs. Picks up the phone. Hangs it back up. I just stand there.

She looks at me. "OPEN THE DOOR." I said, in a very calm voice, "If you'd like my help, you can say, "Mom, can you please help me get the door open." She glares at me. She reads the signs again. PIcks up the phone. Hangs it up. Studies the panel. Then another women comes up to the building. I step out of the way and the woman opens the door and walks in. I stifle a loud laugh. I knew the door was unlocked all the time, but i wasn't telling her.

So we go inside and she goes up to the wrong window. But someone helps her there anyway. They tell her to call a number on the phone. She handles that fine and hangs up and stomps over to the elevator. I follow her. (I was just here a few weeks ago with Bart and Rand getting our fingerprints done to adopt again so I know the routine, but I don't tell her that). We get up to the third floor and she opens the first door and starts heading down the stairs.

I let her get down a half a flight but I don't follow her. She looks up at me. "They told you to take the elevator to the third floor and then take the stairs down to the second floor?" I ask. She stammers, "They said to take the first door on the right." She comes back up the stairs and goes in.

As she is getting her name written on the list I happen to notice that there is a Michael Fletcher on the list as well, two names up. Guess he got transferred to that facility. We also had theblessing of having our next door neighbor there who was helping out with the fingerprinting. Always kind of embarrassing, but his wife used to read this blog so if she still does she knows everything anyway.

As we were leaving she couldn't get out. She just stood there and looked at me. I stood there and smiled at her until finally someone let us know to shut one door so the other would unlock.

Then we went to the elevator. I knew we were on the third floor. She grabbed the door to the stairs and says to me, "That elevator only goes up." Well, I deduced, since there were only three floors in the building, that there might be a problem with the little button by the elevator and that I could, indeed, take the elevator down the stairs. I told her I'd meet her in the van.

She was rude all the way home and even tried to hit me with the door on the way in the house, but I was waiting for it and l stood back away from the door. And all the way home I kept thinking, "This is great blogging stuff."

I find it amazing that there is so much discrepancy between her deeds and her maturity level. I was struck with the irony when I saw the officer fingerprinting a hand that had a locker combination printed on it in red ink.

2 comments:

debbie said...

claudia, you are somethin' else. the spirit in you amazes me.

Boo said...

Congrats on keeping your calm through all that.