On Friday, the day that the world was abuzz about what color The Dress was, I had to go to the passport office because J and I had let ours expire. Getting new passports has been on my to-do list forever but because it wasn’t quite as pressing as other items such as Raising A Kid and Binge Watching The Entire Series Of Veronica Mars so I sort of never really got around to it.
Plus, I reasoned that it wasn’t like anyone was ever just going to randomly invite me on a trip to Europe so it wasn’t as though I was going to need a passport all spur of the moment or anything.
(This is the same reasoning I used to not clean under my couch before The Today Show came to my house and we all know how well that worked out for me. Get it together, inner monologue!)
Luckily for me one of the few expedition offices is in Atlanta so I spent the morning driving downtown.
I arrived at the office about twenty minutes before my husband and so I had to go through security without him.
Now, I am the sort of person who strikes up conversations with total strangers with an alarming frequency. But even I expected my sojourn through the security line to be fairly uneventful. Except it was not.
As I discarded my bags onto the conveyor belt and stepped forward to go through the metal detector the guard put his hand up to stop me.
Then he looked at me and said “White and gold or blue and black?”
Y’all, I laughed SO HARD.
Until he said it was blue and black.
And then I was like “That dress is white and gold. I do not feel as though I should hand important documents to someone who sees blue and black. You might be a part of The Matrix.”
After that I asked where I should wait for my husband since I couldn’t get in line without him. A couple of the security guys overheard me and one pointed to a guy walking in and asked if he was my man.
And because I am incapable of just answering a simple question without being awkward, what I said was: “Nope, I don’t even know that guy. Stop trying to marry me off to strange men, you with your ability to see blue and black dresses.”
So for the next fifteen minutes they made a game out of guessing which man walking through the security line was the one who happened to be married to me.
They’d be all “That guy! That guy looks like a decent fellow. How about that guy?” or “I bet it’s that one. That one’s got good shoe game.”
And so that is the story of how when my husband finally made it just a few minutes before our appointment he was slightly bewildered at the enthusiastic greeting he received from the United States Passport Office Security Team.
It was definitely the most fun that I have ever had at a government agency and totally made up for spending the next five hours in a room where all cell phone use was prohibited.
The lesson here is, keep your passports current, because sometimes people do randomly invite you on last minute trips to Europe in some sort of crazy awesome and expediting a passport costs a small fortune. And also that I will never be convinced that dress is not gold.
(photo of beautiful Europe c/0 minnystock )
