Government Conspiracy

Brandon and I had to send in finger prints to the Texas Dept of Public Safety for them to do a background check on us. We mailed the cards to them on Jan 2nd. We were told that it takes them 2-3 weeks to process. So on week 4, I decided to call them to see what was going on. They informed me that they didn't have us in the system yet which meant 1 of 2 things:
(1) they had not received them back from the dept that does the actual check yet, or
(2) they had received them but they had not yet been put into the system.
So they told me to call back the following week.

That was 2 weeks ago, so I called again this past Friday. The lady looked our names up and said that they had sent everything back to us because payment was not included. Well I did include the $32 payment in the form of a money order, which I guess they lost. So in order to track the money order down, I have to pay $15 and that takes a month to process. So rather than wait, I sent the forms back yesterday with a personal check this time (easier to track, even though the first time I was told a money order was preferred).

Since this is the 2nd government agency that has basically messed up our paperwork, you can only imagine how livid I was at this point. So livid, in fact, that on Saturday when we got the documents back from them in the mail, I wrote both Texas Senators and our US Congressman to tell them how messed up the process is. Doubt it does any good, but it made me feel better at the time.

After mailing the package back to them via FedEx last night, I met Brandon at our favorite Chinese restaurant. We talked a little more about the phone conversations that I had with DPS trying to track down our money order and that led to a discussion on the incompetence of government agencies, which got our blood boiling a little more. At the end of dinner, Brandon opens her fortune cookie to find not 1, but 3 fortunes in it. 2 of them read as follows:

"Don't give up. Your problem gets better next month."

"A short stranger will soon enter your life with blessing to share."

I'm not saying we believe in fortune cookies, but it is kind of ironic that we got those on a day like that. The good news is that it had us laughing and our respective blood pressures went back to normal.