A Tiny Rant

On the Let's See How Many Headaches We Can Make For Ourselves With 9/11 Precautions Page:  Today I had to take my lovely daughter for a drug test for her animal shelter job.  Yes, the place in which she volunteered for her senior project has given her a real job!  I had to TAKE her because of that one-month license suspension, which has a week to go and has been one headache for ME after another.  In order to take a drug test, you must provide a photo ID.  Since the nearby county in which she had her accident is in possession of her license, her only photo ID is her recreation center card.  We got to the drug-testing center only to learn that we were supposed to have understood the generic "photo ID" on the instructions to mean "STATE OR FEDERAL photo ID." 

So off to get a state ID card.  This involved a frantic search of the house for a certified copy of her birth certificate, an hour trip out to her school for a certified transcript, and my presence with her at the Bureau of Motor Vehicles -- two forms of ID and my presence mandated by 9/11 legislation so that she could obtain another form of ID from a state agency that already has her securely listed in its very own computer system.  Back to the drug testing place, where by then the wait was so long that I had to go home to let in the piano tuner and go back to get her.  FIVE HOURS.   That's how long this little episode took.  How fortunate that I had the day off work so that I could invest it in making sure that the world is safe from drug users with false identification.  It would be laughable if it weren't so utterly time-consuming, inconveniencing and pointless -- I bet that the security guards accused in the case of that abducted young woman in Texas had provided adequate ID and had passed drug tests.

And then, on the Why America Is Really Losing Out To The Chinese Page -- while we sat in the waiting room, we were treated to a television blaring forth The View.  A group of women, one of whom was Barbara Walters, were going on and on about Angelina or Angelique or someone and scientology or whatever.  They moved on to an interview with Connie Chung, whom I remember from her reporting days, and her husband, but as far as I could tell neither of them has accomplished anything of significance lately -- they were just there as a joint celebrity presence.   The daughter and I looked at each other after a few minutes of this mini hell-on-earth and asked, "Who on earth watches this stuff?  Does anyone actually want to watch people they don't know gossiping about other people they don't know?"  "People with absolutely no life of their own?" she suggested.

Sorry if I've offended any View watchers out there.  My friends know that I have tried Oprah three times and never made it all the way through a show.  And last week I tried to watch The Today Show to learn a bit more about Deep Throat, and found myself appalled by Katie Couric's general display of idiocy.  Perhaps I am just a tiny bit out of the mainstream.  But I am convinced that if The View is representative of American morning entertainment, we are truly doomed.  We don't have to worry in the least about drug testing for employment , because our brains have already been severely compromised by our very own media.