I had to get fingerprinted yesterday so I can volunteer to teach Spanish at my daughter's preschool. Do not be lulled into a false sense of security thinking that your children are safe from predators because all potential employees or volunteers have to go through a fingerprinting process. The system is only as good as least common denominator. I'm here to tell you that there are many weak or missing links in the operation. I don't even know where to begin...These fingerprinting agencies are set up in spare rooms of low budget businesses. If you have an extra bedroom, you can set up shop. I felt like I was on the set of some bad BBC comedy. I was fingerprinted in a real estate school which was inside a standard office building. The actual real estate school didn't look very credible. Having been inside a 'real estate school' I am much more likely to check any future real estate agents' credentials. This place was essentially The Sally Struthers School of Home Selling. The whole premise of selling a home is based on first impressions and curb appeal. The place could be in shambles structurally, but if looks pretty, then you are more likely to get a bite. It reminded me of the doctor's office where my cousin had her sinus surgery. One walk into the waiting room and I knew that she should have walked right back out and found another doctor. The ripped plastic covers on the seats, the bad flourescent lighting and the dingy sea foam blue painted walls in the waiting room told you everything you needed to know about how much time was spent giving attention to detail. You want your surgeon to pay attention to detail. I felt like I was walking into the waiting room of a sketchy plastic surgeon on the other side of the border in Mexico. The kind that you see as expose's on the 6 o'clock news. This particular real estate school/fingerprinting office gave off this vibe.
The first person to greet me was a doughy faced boy with glassy eyes and unfortunate pock marks and an expressionless stare. "May I help you?" "No, but maybe I can help you", I thought to myself. He was able to hand me an application and I sat down on the cleanest looking piece of furniture I could find, a dining room chair with a plastic cover. All of the furniture appeared as though it had been purchased at the Holiday Inn on the axis road. You know the one, the one that has the commericals on TV saying "everything must go; all artwork, all desks, all lamps. Final Liquidation". Nothing was a matched set and it all had dings on it. There were fingerprints and smudge marks all over the glass top of the dining room table (the set had an Asian motif). I'm sure that if you ran a blue light (the kind used in crime scene investigations to find blood or semen) over the sofa the whole thing would have lit up flourescent blue. One doesn't normally come across window treatments inside an office building. Maybe mini-blinds, but certainly not antebellum era curtains and valences, the kind you might expect to see on a plantation down south, like Tara (these probably wouldn't have passed the blue light test either). So, I sat there, with my daughter (home from school due to illness) trying not to touch anything till my name was called.
As I waited, the proprieter of the school came out into the lobby. She was tall and really skinny and the kind of person who flirted with everyone, man or woman; the kind who talks to loud, winks at you inappropriately, glances at you for approval when she's not even talking to you, half laughs after every statement that she makes-as though everyone is interested in what she is saying or doing. All I could think was, "Why don't you stop talking, put down the Starbucks cup that you are clutching with both hands and get a vacuum cleaner and some Windex." Everything was inappropriate in this place, the furniture, her decorum and her dress. Though she was late 40's to early 50's, she wore skin tight jeans (the kind that are worn by metal band groupies) with a patch of an angel on her left cheek tucked into high heel boots, a sleeveless cowl neck sweater with a cleavage revealing tank top underneath and a big silver ring on her left index finger. You could tell she had a membership to a tanning salon and she had not seen her natural hair color in decades. The current overly treated blond that she wore was so brittle that it probably snapped off every time she brushed her hair. It was probably her idea to run the fingerprinting operation out of the extra room. This would allow her to be subsidized for all the time she spent doing nothing. Maybe she had an ex boyfriend who had been a cop who told her about the scam. "Listen, you don't have to do anything and you get paid $XXX for it a month. They just send you checks. You hang a sign in your window, have a spare room with some low budget computer system and you are listed on the registry of state sponsored fingerprinters." She probably broke up with him after he came home drunk too many times, but at least he got her set up with her little cash cow.
I was escorted back to an room about 5' x 8' to get fingerprinted. There was a sign on the door that said "Secure Room. Enter only with authorized personnel. Everything beyond this door is recorded." It was supposed to make it look official, but the scotch tape holding it up and the poor grade computer paper that was crumpled on one edge made it loose effect. If you have ever seen the show "To Catch a Predator" you could imagine what this 'secure' room looked like. It was the room behind the 2 way mirror that the guy with the headphones, tape recorder, video camera and computer with voice matching capabilities was hiding out in while the bad guy sat on the other side not knowing he was about to get caught. ("I really thought she was 19. That's what she told me in the chatroom. I know I'm not a 15 year old choir boy, but I was gonna tell her that when I met her in person"). No one had bothered to wire this room appropriately. I guess if they needed to quickly close up shop (like when the real estate school accreditors came around) they could pull all the wires down and make it look like just another classroom. The wires poked out of a white tile in the ceiling and hung along the wall. There were 2 computers with a digital camera set up on a tripod attached to them. Along with getting fingerprinted, you had to have your picture taken-a mug shot. The fingerprinting machine was wired directly to the computer and it was like a mini photo copier. I stood in front of the fingerprint copy machine and the junior helper wiped each of my prints with a damp washcloth that had probably been used on the previous 12 fingerprintees and had probably been brought from home by the tall, blond lady. He did each finger on both hands and then all 4 fingers together. I showed my daughter the fingerprints on the computer and told her that no 2 people had the same fingerprints. "And no 2 fingers are the same either" added helper jr. "They are like a snowflake" I explained. To which she responded, "Like Snowflake's (the mouse)." "No" I said, "Animals don't have fingerprints". "What about Star (our dog)". "No, not even dogs" (even though I wasn't not completely sure about that one-maybe they do have dog-prints?).
I paid my $44.20 (which will be deducted from next month's tuition), got my receipt and we left. I guess the fingerprints will be uploaded into some national database to make sure I am not some criminal or creep. All, so I can go into my 4 year old daughter's preschool class and count from uno to diez once a week for 20 minutes. I didn't mind doing it. It's not like I had anything else to do. But, I did learn something. Nothing is probably as secure as you think it is. I have more confidence in my ability to judge a character than the official fingerprinting process. Know your kids' teachers and who they hang out with because this is a far better indicator of what is going on in their lives than some guarentee afforded to you by a beaurocratic institution...
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