Flashback: CIS Appointment

Flashbacks are fun stories or memories from our paperchase phase that never made it to the blog.

For our CIS (Immigration) fingerprinting appointment, we were summoned to appear at this awesome place:

La Gran Plaza is a mall on the south side of Fort Worth (very near my old Seminary stomping grounds).  It's a mall geared completely to the Hispanic population and is about as close as you can get to Mexico without actually leaving Fort Worth.  The CIS office is on the back of the mall.

 

Our appointment was scheduled for 8:00 that morning, so we left our house at 7:00 since we weren't sure what traffic would be like getting down there.  Well, of course, traffic was very light that day and we made it down there with plenty of time to spare.  So, we just walked around the mall and looked in the windows of all the stores that weren't open yet, all the while listening to very loud Tejano music.  [Sidenote:  I'm sure it's a perfectly acceptable volume when people are actually in the mall, but when it's just a couple of you, it's a bit loud.  I'm just sayin'.]

 

As it got closer to 8:00 we headed back to the CIS office.  By that time there were LOTS of people hanging out in front of the office and we started wondering how everything was actually going to work. 

Pretty soon a guy opened up the door, told everybody who had an 8:00 appointment to line up single file in front of the door, and then enter as we were waved in. 

 

The line moved pretty quickly (we were about 10th, or so, in line) and soon we were waved in.  We sat in very functional plastic chairs, filled out our forms and were soon called (by number) back to the lady who double-checked our information.  From there, we were moved to another set of functional plastic chairs and then were called back for our fingerprints. 

 

The guy who fingerprinted me was super cute.  He reminded me of an Hispanic version of Gupta from The Terminal ("Do you have an appointment?").   So cute.  Anyway, as he was entering my information into the computer, we had this conversation:

 

GUPTA:  Rebecca Miller!?  Are you on t.v.?  Do you do the weather?

 

ME:  (Laughing) No, I'm not the weather lady, but I used to get that all the time.

 

Gupta begins to fingerprint me and says...

 

GUPTA:  Too bad, I thought I was fingerprinting a celebrity.

 

ME:  (Laughing some more)  Sorry.  I could pretend if you want.  [I know, so not very funny, but I couldn't think of anything clever to say!]

 

Meanwhile, Rob is having his fingerprints done, and this is what he gets...

 

FINGERPRINT MAN:  What color is your hair?  (Rob has already indicated on his form that his hair is brown.)

 

ROB:  Brown

 

FINGERPRINT MAN:  No (pointing at his very dark hair), my hair is brown.  Your hair is sandy!

 

This was after the lady who checked his form yelled at him for checking the box that said he was born outside of the U.S.  (He was born on an Army base in Berlin).  Note to all future adoptive parents:  Apparently it doesn't "count" as being born outside the U.S. if you were born on a military base in a foreign country.  Go figure!

 

Such fun times.  And to think, we would have missed out on this had we never decided to adopt!  I wouldn't have it any other way :)