About 8 Weeks to Go... plus a Giant RANT

I haven't been doing much updating, mainly because we've been so busy with family coming to visit, and doing some house stuff which includes changing our home office into a room for a little girl. Exciting! We're about 8 weeks away from most likely being ready to travel to Kiev if all goes well- fingers and other assorted limbs are permanently crossed right about now.

Still, it has been a few months of a nightmare rides on roller coasters, some of which I intend to discuss at a later time, when the adoption is finally through and over. We've had one serious thing go wrong that almost made us have to pull out of the process completely- but thank G-d it all got sorted out in the end.

Anyways, I'm steaming mad at something new today and I could just scream. When people say that adoption isn't for the faint at heart, I kind of rolled my eyes previously, and thought "how hard is just filling in a bunch of papers?" Sure, it's a bit of a grind and it's time consuming, but really, if you just dot those i's and cross those t's, how hard can it be? Well indeed that's the case, but what nobody factors in is just all the incompetence of other people that you have no choice in dealing with when it comes to the process itself. It makes me crazy.



Case in point, Immigration Canada. After 15 weeks of increasingly panicky phone calls and utter inaction on their part, the shit finally hit the fan last Friday. When our adoption agent in Kiev relayed the message to our agency here that there still was no open file in our names in Ukraine, I finally lost the plot. What was meant to be a relaxing summer day with my husband turned upsidedown as I headed home to prepare to scream down the phone at somebody. To this point I have been utterly composed and roll-with-the-punches when it comes to things we have no control over, however it's down to the wire now and we can't afford any fuck-ups due to the incompetence of other people. For 15 weeks I have faithfully called for status updates on our file that has mysteriously not been begun to be processed. Yet the other couple who will most likely be travelling with us in Kiev had theirs done and back within 5 weeks- and we applied at the same time! We've heard every excuse in the book: "We can't send an email query yet to the dept because even though we're double the time we said it would be done by, it's still not enough time to question it," to "If we send an email to the dept, they'll have 30 business days to respond to the email, but that's only a response- they'll just say why it's taking this long and there is no promise that they will flag your request as urgent." There is so much more I am leaving out because I don't want to give myself a migraine.

In any case, on Friday when I called, I let my inner bitch out- I'm fighting for my kid. Why on earth should she have to spend a single day more in her life sitting in an orphanage, all because some idiot at Immigration is taking a sick day to eat Kraft Dinner and watch the World Cup? When I was told nobody was available to take my call but somebody would call me back in 24 hours instead, I put the lady on the spot and made her answer: Was she saying that there wasn't a single human being in the office that day who could take my call, or was she saying they were all on coffee breaks or other phone calls? After stuttering and being caught completely off-guard, I informed her I would wait on hold as long as it took for somebody to get to the phone and speak to me TODAY. And this time I patently *refused* to get off the phone until I spoke to somebody's supervisor and got some proper information once and for all.

It paid off. I spoke to a human being who was not a summer student and who could care less about the fact that "gettin' back to me in 30 days" would be PAST our deadline for the Ukrainian authorities to have our entire completed file in their hands- which would mean we would lose our appointment at the state department in Kiev which we have waited almost a full year to obtain, and subsequently any chance at adopting our child. This woman was highly sympathetic and professional, answered every single question I had, and promised to keep in touch with me herself if need be, over the urgency of our file. And this morning, it finally paid off- an email from Immigration that our file is now being processed TODAY. And we can check the status online at any time! I think the clouds parted and a hallelujah chorus began to sing! So one problem down at least.

The second issue (take note if you live in Quebec) has specifically been with International Fingerprinting Services Canada (the location at 200 Rene-Levesque Blvd Complex Guy Favreau Level 00 - Suite #6. Montreal, Que H2Z 1X4). A bigger group of the most useless clowns in business I have yet to see in my life. They have screwed our file up not once, but TWICE and they still don't know their arses from their elbows. These idiots couldn't organise a bun fight in a fucking bakery, all I can tell you is go anywhere else on earth to have your police checks done- even if it means a 2 hour drive- than to use their services. The "rent-a-CSI-investigator" behind the desk thought he knew it all, and actually argued with us the entire time we were there about what form we required. Like, we physically SHOWED him a copy of what our adoption agency wanted, PLUS the previous fuck-up to compare with that he himself gave us in the first place- as in, "don't give us this one again because you screwed it up last time". He just couldn't get it through his meathead, and he tried to STILL convince us he knew better than the adoption authorities in Ukraine!

So this morning I check my phone messages, and lo and behold there is a phone call from "Adam" saying he didn't know what to write for the adoption agency on our form (despite the fact I must have said it 10 times in his office AND the fact that he already had it in his computer from THE LAST TIME we were there and ordered the IDENTICAL form, no less) so he couldn't process it. We were in his office almost 4 weeks ago. And we hear this now. So I got on the phone boiling mad, and as I inform him of my anger at the utter incompetence we've experienced, would you believe he actually says once again, that he also wasn't sure we were going to have the correct form and we should take the one he said instead. That was the final straw. I really let him have it. I laid into him and said that I was not going to argue the point again- he was there to simply perform a service which was to provide exactly what we asked for without the "benefit" of his unrequired advice that now had cost us in total, an additional 2 months of needless waiting time between his first and second screw-up for the EXACT SAME REASONS of doing what he thought was "right" instead of what we SPECIFICALLY ASKED FOR. I am actually so furious, I'm going to call his manager again to complain about him.

The bottom line is if everybody would just do the fucking job they were meant to do properly, efficiently, and without having to check up on them like infants every five minutes, all of this could be avoided. Is it such a hard concept to understand?