This Sunday Jackie was away watching some of our grand kids so I was able to sit back and do some channel surfing. I stopped for a few moments to watch a scene from an old James Bond movie. In it Sean Connery as Bond rings an apartment bell and a female voice invites him in. Bond is pretending to be a man named Franks who was supposed to pick up a load of diamonds from the woman to smuggle them out of the country.
The woman greats Bond/Franks while dressed stylishly in her underwear, tells him to pour himself a drink, takes his empty glass and goes back to her bedroom/lair to get dressed, dusts the glass for fingerprints then takes a photo of the prints and opens up an armoire revealing a large screen TV/computer, inserts the photo into a print reader and gets the confirmation on the screen that the prints match that of the diamond smuggler Franks. Putting on a black lacy see through covering over her underwear she heads back to Bond/Franks and returns the glass but Bond's keen sense of smell notices that his prints have been I D'd. Later on we see Bond talking on the phone with spy gadget genius Q thanking him for the fake latex print we see him pealing off his thumb.
Monday morning before Jackie and I leave for work we get an urgent call from our boss telling us that we need to get finger printed TODAY!!! He instructs us to head to the main office where we will get the proper forms and when we get there he will tell us where to go to get the job done. Every 5 years people like us who conduct road tests for the State of Michigan need to get re-fingerprinted and evidently the person from the company in charge of maintaining our files was a little lax in letting us know that the 5 years were up.
Since Jackie is still in her underwear I tell her to put on something nice and we soon head out and pick up our forms at the office. We get there just as the boss does and when we head inside there is another guy on the phone with the place that does the fingerprinting trying to make sure that we can get in ASAP. As we are rushing to the location Jackie fills out our forms and asks me how to spell Caucasian. "Is it t-i-a-n- or s-i-a-n?" We agree on s-i-a-n and find the office which fortunately is only a slight detour from our regular route into work.
The fingerprint place is in a suite at an office building. There is a front parking lot and a back parking lot. Jackie tells me to park up front but since I have been there before I head to the lower back lot which I think might be faster because I know that the entry ways in front go to different businesses. The back lot has construction going on and is empty and I must do as my sweet wife kindly first suggested and go back and park up front.
We take about 4 turns through several hall ways up and down stairs and eventually find the fingerprint office. The door is open but the guy is not there. He does get back in a few moments and we each get a turn to place our fingers on a print reader. These are displayed on a computer screen not that much different that the one in the Bond movie (well, theirs did need an large armoire to hold and ours were on a thin screen desk top plastic swivel base). I was the first to go and mine took about 10 minutes because the print reader was having a little problem getting a good shot. Perhaps it was the fact that the guy was standing next to me, hip to hip while holding my hand and my extended fingers were a little tight. When he got to Jackie the machine went "blip, blip, blip" and hers took about 2 minutes. I did tell the guy to watch it because this was the first time in over 43 years that any man but me had held those dainty little hands.
Fingerprinting done I drive about 80 mph to make it to our test side on time and then inform my first client after he is doing 30 in a 25 zone that he needs to stay at the speed limit or below or he may fail his driving test. My next client is a black woman, um, African American woman, who happens to tell me while on the test that she has a Caucasian uncle. "Caucasian" I mumble to myself, "C - a - u - c - a - S - I -A - N."
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