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It’s all Franz Kafka’s fault. I should never have read him at such an impressionable age.
I spent the afternoon in the immigration office after doing some running around for paperwork earlier in the day. Numbers were called out over a speaker. When the number on the piece of paper I’d been issued was called, I got to approach the counter. That the papers I’d submitted had been accepted would be made known to me.
While I was waiting all I could think was, “What if they find out?” Not that there’s anything to find out, mind you. I am, in the bureaucratic scheme of things, a generally unproblematic person, just troublesome enough to avoid attracting the suspicion that the too-perfect deserve. But I couldn’t help it. “What if they find out? What’s the worst that could happen?”
Of course I got my visa, my permission to stay here for another 3 years. They don’t stamp them in your passport anymore, which I was disappointed to see. They paste in these dot-matrixed slips yanked from the maws of daisy wheel printers (which sound like falsetto chainsaws as they log the immigrant timber, the first step to useful lumber). It was handed over with a smile and in good time and I strode down the stairs as if from the gallows, allowing myself the cautious uplift of the reprieved man. Bureaucracies have this effect on me.
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Posted to General Rants • 2002.11.18 (Mon) • 21:58
Comments
Posted by resonance 2002.11.19, 11:37
I love your description of the “…maws of daisy wheel printers (which sound like falsetto chainsaws as they log the immigrant timber)…” Hard to tell whether that’s Kafkaesque, Terry Gilliam-Brazil-era-esque, or Cohen-brothers-esque, but regardless, it’s quite a chilling scenario you depict.
And yeah, best lay off the Kafka as a toddler. Unless you want justification for the paranoia that inevitably accompanies adulthood.
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