Have I mentioned the travails of getting a security clearance for the government department for which I do work? If you have spent any time living out of the country in the past 5 years you have to have a police check from said country certifying that you do not have a criminal record. As a no longer resident of NYC, the only way for me to do this is to get a FBI check. All good so far, you can do this on line, pay your money on line but then you have to submit inked fingerprints on a special form. I have 4 times scheduled fingerprints with the fingerprint hot line (yep, it really does exist though hot is rather a misnomer as they only answer the phone between 10 and noon), turned up with my form, postal order (no cash or credit cards accepted) and had a police civilian volunteer take my prints. Every single time they have been rejected by the FBI as not sufficient quality.
I have prevailed on the powers that be to grant me an exemption. My client has taken pity on me and is supporting this but yesterday I had to talk to the man from government security and explain my sad story to him yet again. I offered to do a statutory declaration. He had me send him copies of my FBI rejections and said he would see what he could to to help me. In the meantime, one of my team has gone over to work on a project at the agency that protects the nation and managed to get passes and access for her non citizen team within a week. I just want to be able to enter and leave the building without an escort:(
In the meantime, I am having good success on eBay and selling small stuff. I have learned that wrapping stuff nicely in tissue paper makes no difference to the feedback I get and sending stuff fast is what people really want so now they just get stuffed in the envelope and sent off. It's only a trickle of $20 sales but it feels good to send stuff out in to the world that someone else values and which decreases my clutter.
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