the U.S. Embassy in Cairo

On the whole, I think the appointment system has led to a marginal improvement. Now you wait for only 45 minutes after taking a number instead of 2.5 hours as seemed to be the previous average. Better yet, I forgot my piece of paper from the website signup and they were not complete jerks about it.

Bureaucrats are bureaucrats, though, and the exercise of petty arbitrary power seems to be part of the job no matter where in the world you go. Such people remain experts at setting up situations where you either have to act unprompted or ask a question, and if you act unprompted they pretend to be shocked that you did something hastily without permission, and if you ask a question they pretend it was a stupid question. There’s no point hoping for anything different from this class of characters; you just have to be prepared not to invest any energy in your dealings with them beyond the bare minimum. I’ve been told that the IRS is the worst of all, and of course they hold such a big hammer that you simply have to put up with everything from them. But God, I hope I never have to go to an audit with those people, after the stories I’ve heard. The Philadelphia customs people were bad enough, however.

Before I left home to see the big wide world, perhaps the most heinous human beings I ever encountered were the two vicious women at our local driver’s license bureau. They were universally loathed for their cattiness and pettiness, to the point that letters to the editor were often printed in the newspaper complaining about them. It took years before their behavior changed– pretty much overnight, which surely means that a new boss eventually came in and screamed at them. Suddenly, those two obnoxious hellcats had become philanthropic sweethearts.

But before that happened, I like others spent years in dread of ever getting my license renewed. One day I went in for that purpose, and when sitting down to get my photo taken I heard the ridiculous command: “Face West!” Well, my sense of direction isn’t bad, but when I’m inside a prefabricated building sitting at a cocked angle inside the parking lot of a mall, I can’t say I always know the compass directions perfectly. So, I looked around helplessly for a couple of seconds. That hideous woman scowled at me as though I had just admitted to not knowing how to spell “dog,” then pointed sternly toward one wall. I looked to the wall, where I saw a gigantic sign bearing, in perhaps 500-point font size, the letters “WEST.” What a rotten person.

The guy outside the Embassy today wasn’t quite as bad, though he did seize one easy laugh at my expense when it was unclear which of two lines I was supposed to get in. He pretended that it should have been obvious, as such people always do. But otherwise it wasn’t bad. And I felt some sympathy for him when I realized that he does, in fact, have a mildly dangerous job. Working the front gate of a U.S. Embassy does entail certain physical risks.