Adders

"I know from long experience all my men have the artistic talent of a cluster of colour-blind hedgehogs in a bag."

-- Rowan Atkinson as Black Adder, from BBC's The Black Adder series

--

Filled out the last of the bank docs. Hopefully, they can show up soon and operate, get my account on its feet again. In terms of mere pagination, this infection (illegal amputation?) requires over ten sheets of paper to decipher and complete, which--shocker, I know--will oust my 2006 Michigan Income Tax Return as the biggest papertrail I've ever had to blaze because of mulah. That was a seven-pager, worksheet after worksheet of instructions and boxes so convoluted, so idiotic, that pissants and pundits alike can't help but do something wrong.

Bureaucracy is a bitch. A big, fat, smiling, tie-wearing biotch.

--

So is the woman who notarized my affadavit this afternoon at the courthouse in Kentucky. (The Cinci house has sadly little parking around it, none of it free, and is situated in this funny part of downtown where one-way streets appear out of nowhere about as frequently as homeless pedestrians who sell hats when the Reds play. It makes driving--and parking--hard to do in a timely manner.)

But about the courthouse bitch: As always, there's a story.

--

I drove away from the courthouse downtown, frustrated that I hadn't found any parking spaces after driving around for fifteen minutes. At a Chase bank in Newport, I found out that notaries in banks are bonded to their place of employment; in other words, as I had no member card for Chase bank, Chase bank could not notarize anything for me. My lunch break was disappearing fast. I asked the nice lady (she looked like the teacher on The Magic Schoolbus) for directions to the nearest courthouse. She had this blank stare. "Turn right, and you go past the Levee, and you kind of..." [blank stare] "...well, there's the parkin' garage, and you don't go through it, you just sort of..." [blank stare] "...well, you go around it."

"I know what you mean."

"Yeah, you go around it. And you'll keep goin' for a few blocks, I don't know how many, and then you'll see York Street. The courthouse is this biiiiiiig--" [shows me with her hands just how big] "--building on your left."

"So it's on York?"

"On York and Fourth." [blank stare] "I think."

"Thank you." I left the bank and made a right, and drove for about five minutes before realizing that when the frazzled teller told me to turn right, she meant left. I pulled a uey, almost had an accident because it was a one-way (KY studied street planning under Cinci, apparently) and found my way to the courthouse. Sure enough, York and Fourth. I parked, paid, and walked in.

There's this long hallway, and a fat old man behind a table by a metal detector. He's slapping his meaty arm on the aluminum table, screaming at a hallway filled with mothers and children, shouting, "DOWN! DOWN! QUIET DOWN!" [slam, slam] "QUIET, OR I'LL KICK ALL OF YOU OUT!"

He didn't see me, so I walked through the metal detector, grabbed my keys and backpack, and walked past him.

I found a notary in a clerk's office, and as she began to pen her Hancock, she stopped and said, "Oh, that's two dollars."

"Oh, there's a charge? I didn't know that."

"Well. It's two dollars." She was being a bitch. "Two dollars for every notary signature."

"I don't have any cash on me, sorry. Can you...I don't know, send me a bill for it, or something?"

"Do you have a debit card?"

I sighed. "That's why I'm here, actually. See?" I pointed to the top of the form. "I'm filing a stolen-debit-card report."

She smiled slightly, a light and tight bitch smile, where the mouth sort of widens and shrinks at the same time. A snooty French smile, a feline killer smile. "Why didn't you go to Cincinnati?"

--

I got her signature, pro bono, and, like I said, my forms are all in order.

Money, man: It makes the world fucking go round.