Fingerprinting "fun"

Here's how Wednesday looked:

10:30AM - We leave Woodinville to drive to downtown Seattle.
11:20AM - We arrive at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. We pull into the only available parking lot. We pay $5 for the privilege of doing so (Can we say 'extortion', boys and girls? Good ... I knew you could ...).
11:25AM - Kate, the kids and I enter the building. We go through security and on to the first lineup. After about 5 minutes as the second people in the line, I am called to the counter and receive a number. I am instructed to go to the second room.
11:30AM - We take a seat in the second room. There are more than 50 people sitting in the room, waiting. There are counters all around one end of the room but only one counter is taking customers; #11. There is an LED "Now serving #..." sign on one side of the room. I am suddenly glad that I came more than 30 minutes early for my 12:00PM appointment as this is obviously a first-come, first-served situation. NOTE: All times are approximate after this point.
12:30PM - I get called to counter 11. She takes my form and asks to see my hands. She pulls out a new number and paper clips it to my appointment notice along with my green card and a form that I had to fill out, of information that they already have. She tells me to have a seat and wait for someone to call my number. I think to myself that I have done that already. Having a new number doesn't make me feel any more like I am getting anywhere. I have no cellphone reception and can't call anyone.
12:45PM - I notice something odd about my green card; it says that it is class IR6. I am wondering how I never noticed this before. I decide to ask the Nice Lady at counter 11 what that means. She laughs, says, "Oh, you don't need to worry about that." Ummmm ... I return to my seat. I mean, what could I have said in response? I purpose to look it up online as soon as I get home.
1:15PM - My number is called. This means that I get to enter the room beyond counter 11 ... and take my seat in a line, in a third room. Am starting to feel like a Dave Barry column.
1:40PM - I check to see if I finally have cellphone reception; I do. I call Rob to give him an update. Also, I am killing time. We chat for about 5 minutes until, suddenly, my most recent number is called. I quickly end the call and hop to the fingerprinting station.
1:45PM - Another nice lady spends the next 10 or so minutes taking my fingerprints on a fancy scanning machine. She ends up calling someone over to help as my left little finger refuses to scan correctly. Ridge breaks mar the reading, something like that. Together, they complete the 10 print scan. It occurs to me that this is the second time since I began dealing with INS that I have had fingerprints taken on a machine exactly like this. I wonder idly where that first set of prints went. Nice Lady #2 offers me a comment card to fill out on my experience. I only wrote that parking should be free and, barring that, that it shouldn't be "cash only". I mean, it's like having pay parking at a hospital. Nobody chooses to come here. We are forced. To not come would mean denial of our citizenship applications. Yet, there is no mention of a parking fee on the appointment notice. What about people who don't carry cash? And I paid a $70 "biometrics fee" to cover the cost of fingerprinting in the first place. You'd think that would cover parking, eh?
2:00PM - I am given my appointment notice back, with a stamp indicating that I showed up, in case there's ever any question of that. I ask Nice Lady #1 how many appointments I might expect to have with INS before my citizenship is finalized. She says I can ask at the counter in the first room on the way out. By this time, however, there is a huge line in the first room. I figure 2 1/2 hours is probably enough time to have blown on this part of the process and elect to skip the line up, save my question for another day, another office.

Afterwards, we go for a late lunch at Canyons in Redmond, stop at the vitamin store to get some tooth powder, DIM and OptiZinc before heading for home. We are all completely zonked. There's something inherently exhausting and demoralizing about a visit to an INS office, even if you reasonably have nothing to fear.

BTW, I looked it up. IR6 just means that there are no conditions on my permanent residency.