Sooooo I told you about the part in your I-600A where you get fingerprinted. They call it biometrics which is way, WAY more fancy than it should be called. Even though I'd previously heard it referred to as being fingerprinted, I was still hoping for a body scan or voice recognition or something worthy of a name like biometrics.
Come on, say it out loud. You know you want to. It's like a secret agent word!
But no, it was fingerprints, exactly like the ones I did at CSPD when I was starting the staff program at GCM. I have now been fingerprinted FOUR times. Once in order to do something with CSISD (I can't remember if it was subbing or being a field trip supervisor or for my certification or what). Once for the GCM staff employee paperwork. Once for our FBI background check. And (hopefully for the very last time) now for our I-600A. Dumb! Or at least a waste of time and resources; it's not like my fingerprints are changing.
Anyway, all that complaining aside, I have a story for you... Ags and not-Ags...
We got our appointment in the mail on Friday. There is no number for the center you're assigned, so you can't call and ask if there's a good time to come in. Moreover, this is the beginning of the school year, so it's a ca-razy time to be scooting on down to Houston and back (oh, did I mention?). Especially for Stephen, since he's the Campus Director and is currently fielding more calls from people in these two weeks than I do in a year (praise the Lord!). So I cook up a plan that we'll leave at 7am, get there at 8:30 (barring traffic in Houston, hah.) and hopefully they'll fingerprint us.
We show up at 8:50 (of course there was some traffic, but it wasn't so very bad), and the lady at the front says she cannot see us now and to come back to try to be seen at 11. This is quite a conundrum for us, as we have a dear friend watching our dear toddler. And this dear friend (hi, Jana!) has never put our toddler down for a nap. And sometimes he goes down like a mogwai and sometimes like a gremlin. And I prefer not to subject my friends to gremlins.
So we sit there weighing the pros and cons of staying or not staying and decide to stay. And praise the Lord for that! I wish the lady would've let us just wait there because, when we came back at 10:50, we waited for maybe three minutes. Not that I minded going to Shipley's... So seriously, after all that weighing and being frustrated, we walked out the door at 11:01. Hurray!
Anyway, just my two cents on the biometrics part of your I-600A... maybe it's better to come a little later in the day if you aren't going to wait for your appointment.
I saw you mention biometrics on facebook and was left wondering what the heck that meant...but it does sound much cooler than fingerprinting. It's weird that they didn't let you do it in town though, even the department of defense let me get mine done in cs, but at least it all worked out in the end.
ReplyDelete