Irish Bureaucracy Hooray!

Hello! So like I said in my last post, I've gotten my Garda card! I first showed up here on Monday at about 4pm, but guess what?? The office is open until 10pm but they had stopped issuing numbered tickets hours beforehand, meaning that enough people to fill up 6 more hours were already waiting!! So on the advice of the surprisingly nice front desk man, I came back the next morning at 8:30am to get in the special student line outside. Even though they don't start paying attention to that line until 9am. And the line was already around the block. For reals. All I've got to say is thank god it wasn't raining and that I had had the foresight to buy a breakfast crepe to eat in line (thank you breakfast crepe girl!). It wasn't that bad actually, I got my ticket - wooo #284 - and the lady told me to come back at 12:30. So I walked around downtown a lot, went to the Hugh Lane Gallery that I hadn't gotten to see a few weeks ago, read my book on a bench by the Liffey and window shopped.

Got back at noon and guess what number they were servicing? Why it was 140! Awesome. So I walked more, window shopped more, read more. At about 2:30 they were finally at number 220 so I figured I ought to just stick around there. And seriously, GNIB, you would make so much money if you had a cafe. And you could charge whatever you wanted! You've got a hungry, anxious, captive audience, why not make some serious clams AND chill out the people in the waiting area? Also, my uniformed friends, you have got to make a child play room. It doesn't have to be awesome or anything, just a room with some lame doctor office toys, books and changing table. There were understandably loads of small children there with their parents, and these were some bored and frustrated kids. I felt for them, if I didn't know how to talk I'd have been crying and whining too. And another thing, why in the world is the entire bathroom area lit with blue flourescent lighting? It gave an almost black-light quality to everything and was super unsettleing. That's got to be a hazard in terms of inducing seizures.

What I don't get are the people who waited there the whole day. I was stressed out and uncomfortable enough from just the 2 hours I spent there, I could not imagine how I would have felt to sit there for the entire 7. And I was just getting my student registration done and was relatively secure that my documents were in order and that I would be approved, and English is my first language. It must have been awful for the people who weren't secure that everything would work out. Sitting there I realized that my privelege as a white, educated, English speaker must have reduced the stress level considerably. So way to go fellow immigrants, you've got my respect!