Are you kidding me?!?!?!?!

One little blip on my schedule today was to stop by Hannah's elementary school sometime between 1 and 4 pm, to pick up her school schedule. More of a "piece of paper with her new teacher's name on it" than a "schedule," per se, but whatever...

So Amy and I headed over there during a later-than-usual lunch, expecting to just stop by and pick up the new information. I had no reason to expect otherwise, as there was no additional information provided in the packet that arrived a week or so ago. Alas - my expectations were laughable, at best. I'll confess that laughing was not the reaction that I went with. My reaction was a bit more colorful, and a bit less kid-friendly.

So here's what we walked into:


Well, in the absence of my camera, this is as close as I can get to showing you the absolute MAYHEM that was taking place inside the school gym... Mind you, we're on our lunch hour, and it takes at least 15 minutes each way to get back to Hannah's school, and we'd already stopped by the house to look for my badge. (That's a whole other story, and another $25 out the window... argh!) AND - we still hadn't picked up any food yet...

Keep in mind that every other parent brought their entire herd of hellions to the school with them, and have now released them into the wild - letting them run around like packs of wild animals around the gym. And half of these families cannot speak English, despite the geographic location of the school residing within the United States. Another point of frustration for me.

So I got in line. It took almost 10 minutes to get to the head of this line, which I discovered was only the first of many, and was just to pick up some registration forms, to register Hannah for a school that she already attended last year. They made the mistake of asking me how I was doing. I told them they probably didn't want to know. They made a secondary mistake of inquiring further. I informed them that this was perhaps the least efficient setup I had ever witnessed and that I was highly irritated. One lady made a tertiary mistake of saying, "Well if you have any better ideas, I'd love to hear it." (be sure to use a really condescending voice when saying this.) So I proceeded to whip out, "Well, you could have sent out all of these forms in the packet that you sent us a week ago, so that we could have had them filled out before we got here." To which she responded, "Well do you know how expensive that would be? It already cost us $60 to send out the original packets..." Then what are we "donating" $15 per kid for???

So I snatched my English version of the paperwork and proceeded to fill it out - fuming and muttering unpleasantries all the while. Amy and I proceeded through SEVEN other lines of ridiculousness... Including the mandatory "donation" line where I wanted to slap the lady but couldn't because she's my RS Pres, the lunch signup line, the nurse line (she was one of my favorite people, because she didn't make me fill out another unnecessary form), the after-school programs line (he was my other favorite because he gave me information to take home and look over without having to fill out or turn anything in today), the emergency contacts line, the OTHER emergency contacts line, the line where I finally got the ONE paper I thought I was coming to get, and the PTA line where I paid my $4 that our school apparently never sees. Awesome.

Upon completion, we tried to exit the gym, which did not have another exit, so we had to force our way through the new sea of people waiting to begin the inefficient and poorly executed atrocity they called "registration." I finally moved some wandering and seemingly parent-less child out of the way by her head, because she couldn't understand my semi-friendly warning (in English) to move out of the way... By the time we finally made it down the ramp and back into the unidirectional parking lot, I was so frustrated that I could have punched someone right in the mouth.

After getting in the car, Amy looks over and says, "I don't want to be rude, but... you live in a really lame area. I was looking around at some of those people and... there were some crazies!" To which I responded heartily, "I know!!! It's like a bunch of carnies... with kids!" And they are reproducing with wild abandon!

Did I mention that I have developed a loathing abhorrence for Provo?!?!?!

My only hope is that Hannah will get accepted into the charter school that I fell in love with...