My visit to Derby

[Undertoad]

So my boss hands me his credit card and tells me to book my travel to Derby. The one in England. Rhymes with Terence Trent D'arby.

I feel like, as an adult, pulling this off seamlessly is somehow proof that I have my shit together. It isn't really. It's not an adventure. It's situation normal: in business, you fly to another continent, use different money and voltages. It's just part of what you might do for work.

These days you can get a passport quickly, from a big city Customs House. You need proof from your employer that you need to fly within two weeks. The letter saying so has to be on official letterhead. My employer faked a date within two weeks, and I was off to get a passport.

(So, appreciate this: you can get a passport fast, if you have a letterhead Word template. You should probably use a color printer to make it look more, like, real and expensive and stuff, but the clerk probably doesn't care.)

Then there had to be an official certifying of my birth by departments of whatever fuckin' records they keep on you in various county offices. It was actually important that the paper certificate had a raised seal, signifying that... someone had an embosser.

In this day and fuckin' age, we are still depending on pieces of paper. Now I'm not in favor of connecting all the IT systems of every government everywhere, but if they're going to employ someone to operate an embosser, surely they can employ someone to answer the phone, look up a record in a database, and tell the federales that Toad, first name Under, is not fibbing when he tells you although he had the misfortune of having been born, at least he got lucky and did so in the U S of goddamn A, which means he is a citizen, according to how they set things up here.

It turns out that you can't pay for your passport application with another person's credit card, even if it's the card of the employer who signed your letterhead document. So I had to pay cash. The price of a last-minute passport is $195. I had $200, all in twenties. They don't give out change, because of course that's simply not possible. Not possible. The Department of State can't operate cash drawers. What do you think they are, a retail operation?

So I paid $200. But after all that, the government checked my shit over and said it is OK for me to leave the country.

Suckers.