Yeah, just think of the craxy e-mail feedback we'd get.

Do you think ... maybe you could ... injure your right hand a little? Near the wrist? Please?

an accredited US university that won't enroll you or give you an ID unless you're either a citizen or a resident alien with all your paperwork in order

Wait? No foreign students? What school was that?

sprinkle Special K

My god! THIS is what a "kprinkle" is!!!!

KPRINKLE!!!

My god (which I just somehow typoed as "toe" -- ha!) -- it was a word just waiting for its definition!!

(Edit: and at least I figured out how god became toe -- my left hand was a row up. I was afraid it was Freudian!!)

Oh, thank doG, we have finally learnt to understand our kprinkle.

I have just been waiting for years for some kprinkle closure!

Wait? No foreign students? What school was that?

Okay, I said it wrong because it's been so long since this was one of my job duties, but, having for a (blessedly) short time worked on setting up student visas for incoming postdocs from all over the world, I do remember working on a full metric assload of paperwork to ensure that their right to legally enter the country, enroll at the school, and visit their home countries and return as needed was written in stone. "Resident alien" is the wrong phrase; just "person on a student visa"? I can't remember.

The point was that even if my friend weren't a US citizen (which he in fact was), there was no way he could've gotten a valid US university student ID without having said metric assload of paperwork behind him; that one tiny little document represents dozens of hours of labor and eleventy-jillion forms.

His ID could have been forged, of course, but the border agents might then have asked why he'd bothered to get a forged college ID when he could've gotten a forged passport or birth certificate or practically anything else with more legal weight. And then the border agents would have had to ask themselves why they'd cheerfully waved through all the white folks with identical IDs.

I do remember working on a full metric assload of paperwork to ensure that their right to legally enter the country, enroll at the school, and visit their home countries and return as needed was written in stone.

Hey! That's kinda like my job!

I went to school in Quebec, so fake IDs weren't a big deal, but ... yes, they were being hypocritical -- not by stopping him, just by not stopping the others.

Fake IDs are everywhere, aren't they? And the lower the legal weight, the easier they probably are to fake. And I used my school ID long after the grounds on which I obtained it were invalid.

Which is why I'm continually stunned that folks were let across borders on such crap paperwork. Oy.

Hey! That's kinda like my job!

cries for Allyson

I wonder if, when I drift off in meetings, they can tell when it's say, pain, or fantasies of dismemberment, or pretty man thoughts. I do try to nod assuringly at the right pauses, but someone called me on drifting off during a krav explanation, saying "This time it looked different." Yeah. So did he.