MURPHY: At immigration office, questioning mundane queues

I’ll admit it. I’ve heard a fair share of threats in my day.  They vary from the mundane to the slightly more interesting. For instance, there is the “If you do that one more time, I’m sending you to your room.” Or, the “If you tell anyone what I said I’ll never talk to you again.” And of course, the “If you don’t catch this ball I’m going to kill you.” (I got stuck with the overly competitive kid as a gym partner in second grade.) 

At the times they were presented, these threats were quite powerful. However, since the country of Ireland threatened to deport me if I didn’t receive a special stamp on my passport last week, these earlier warnings have become but dust in the wind. 

Truth be told, getting kicked out of a country was not on my top-10 list of things to do before I die. But the more I thought about it, though, the cooler it sounded: Being bad never felt so good.

That is, until my actual anxious, neurotic self kicked in, and I envisioned myself stranded in a cardboard box in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, hoping only to see my goldfish’s face one more time. 

I practiced my “I’m just a poor, innocent student with no visa but lots of love” face and wandered over the National Immigration Bureau in Dublin. It looked a lot like the Department of Motor Vehicles. The building smelled of sweat and frustration, the employees were angry and ignorant and with each new flash, an unflattering picture was produced for an ID.

I waited in line to receive a numbered ticket from an uneasy bald man who clearly hated his life. When I said thank you, he responded, “For what?” and pointed me to the waiting room.

The waiting room looked like an emergency room. The seats were packed with people rubbing their migraine-filled foreheads, children screaming and sneezing all over the chairs and groups shouting over other groups in 10 different languages: definitely my dream setup.

There was also a group of guys playing travel Scrabble in the back of the room. They wore matching Hawaiian shirts and cargo shorts. Initially, I thought these guys were brilliantly prepared. Then, I realized that they neither had tickets nor a reason to be in the immigration office, other than for a midweek wordplay competition and to enjoy watching people getting kicked out of the country. I thought one of the guys looked like my second-grade gym partner, so I went to the other side of the room. 

I took a seat and looked at my ticket. I was number 487. They had just called number 291. I sat and watched one of those red, mechanical signs that delis have in front of the customer-service windows that state what number they are working on. After an hour passed, the sign read only 324 and I felt like the odd-colored hunk of meat pushed behind the turkey and ham in the deli case that never gets purchased. 

All this waiting made me think about the huge amount of waiting we, as human beings, must do. We wait nine months in a presumably warm and stuffy “natural waiting room” until we can hang out on earth. Then we wait even longer to speak our little minds with words like “mama,” “dada” and, for those tykes lucky enough to star in such cinematic gems as the “Look Who’s Talking” movies or “America’s Funniest Home Videos,” idiotic voiceover phrases that fund their parents’ trip to Atlantic City. 

As we grow older, the waiting continues. Do you remember the first moment you cruised down the street on a bike without training wheels? You know you felt like Uncle Jesse riding his motorcycle in Full House. Liberation ran through your Hi-C-filled veins because you knew the wait was finally over — four-wheelin’ it was just an activity for the unsuccessful. 

A few years later, four-wheelin’ it becomes an honor once again as you wait for your 16th birthday and driver’s license. You wait through years of parents coordinating dropoff and pickup times at the movies and the mall; rides to the orthodontist for getting braces on, tightened and off; making friends with the upperclassmen (or students who stayed back a few years and could drive freshman year) so you can get rides to football games and dances instead of being dropped off by your parents. 

Once you’re sixteen, you can’t wait to be 18. Oh yeah, the big 1-8, a true adult. Life seems like a highway, and you want to ride it all night long. Until you realize that you can’t get into most places until you are 21, and then you can’t believe you now have to wait three more years for that birthday. 

This brings me to the conclusion that from now on, I’m going to try to embrace life’s waiting games like toothless, rum-soaked men embrace Keno nights at the local bowling alley. I should take all this downtime as a gift. It’s a time to look around, examine my surroundings and find faults in those around me so I can feel better about myself. 

Someone once said, “Good things come to those who wait.” After five-and-a-half hours in this immigration office, I decided this statement is true. I am now a legal woman, with 100 fewer euros in my pocket and a painfully embarrassing ID photo to prove it.

Megan Murphy, a junior in the School of Education who is studying in Dublin this semester, is a weekly columnist for The Daily Free Press. She can be reached at mmurphy1@bu.edu.