Too-familiar territory

So the reason I drove to work on Friday rather than taking the train was because I needed to stop off first thing in the morning at the offices of my corporate HQ, where a member of our internal security department took two sets of fingerprints to be submitted as part of my latest background investigation. I had a background check done about four years ago but now I need another one, apparently, although this came as news to all of us who have been trying to get this system migrated over to the classified network. Clearly if we had known that such measures were required they would have been initiated months and months ago as opposed to last week. But, again, either the requirements have changed just within the (admittedly wide) window of time during which this project has been ongoing, or it’s so far outside the standard rigidly-defined norms that it’s impossible to keep up with all the exceptions being made that we need to respond to accordingly.

At any rate, the investigation has been initiated (see below) and I’ve submitted everything they’ve asked for and supposedly while it’s underway (also see below) I can be granted a written waiver to start doing the actual transition work so that we stand a small chance in flaming perdition of hitting our early July deadline. Of course there is some nebulosity as to what exactly “initiated” and “underway” mean because of course it didn’t count when I had just logged in and started filling out online forms about my work history and (non-existent) prior contacts with foreign governments, so everything I’ve done so far no doubt has to be collected and submitted and officially entered into some Cold War era mainframe and then when those gears are spinning things will truly be far enough along that I can be granted my slight shortcut waiver. But your guess is as good as mine as to when that is going to happen, and thus at the moment I am in hurry up and wait mode once again.

And I probably shouldn’t say any more on the subject, because not only am I simultaneously repeating myself and saying nothing of substance, but I really shouldn’t tempt fate that the new background check will somehow discover this blog and piece together what a complaining, implicitly untrustworthy crank I am. But over the weekend I did in fact make the Saturday night showing of Man of Steel, so I will pause here and post again later today with my breakdown of that cinematic experience.