Pepa, what is in this gazpacho? "Tomats, pepinos, cebola, barbituatos..."
Sometimes, Cookie thinks that he is trapped in a nightmare, not of his own making. I do wake up from these, which is better than the alternative, which seems like a bad way to go.
And then there are the nightmares that he finds himself within life. In Women on the Verge of Nervous Breakdown, Pedro Almodovar examines the issues of farce and circumstance. How we hang ourselves waiting on the whim of possibly getting something reasonable from someone we need to get approval from because we played by the rules. But in reality, we hold the cards by hanging in there.
Case in point, the nightmare haunting me day in and day out since the third week of January 2020 has been the New York City Health Department, a Byzantine bureaucracy screwier than any Almovador movie.
In the 1930s, the State of New York passed one of the strictest adoption privacy laws in the United States. Unless specifically stated, all New York adoption proceedings were locked down, and they went BACK in time and locked down adoptions that happened beforehand as well. Whether it was through a government agency, institution, or private agency, the information was locked down tighter than tight. They would not avail records in cases of emergency, or medical issues, or even end-of-life requests. Oh, you might be able to get an abstract, but no identifying information. Ever. Millions of adults went to the graves without knowing who their parents were if they had siblings.
In 2019, the state finally passed a law granting access. The state government would handle the applicants from outside New York, but it fell to the New York City Health Department to fulfill their requests.
A word about the City of New York's governmental bureaucracy regarding vital statistics: it is an impenetrable fortress of unwillingness to do anything for anyone. They follow the law, but they do everything not to cooperate with the spirit of the law or its intent.
I do not joke about this, reader. There is case law to back up my claim. The city of New York has repeatedly refused to turn over information that falls under the State's sunshine laws. They refuse to even issue the indexes!
Well, if you twist their arms, but they are going to try and bill you tens of thousands of dollars to compile that which they already have on file.
So in January 2020, we filed for the pre-adoption birth certificate of a deceased member of our immediate family. That was sixteen months ago. And what was supposed to take 4 to 6 weeks went something like this:
January 2020: Did you get the application? "We don't know. If you sent it in, we have it and we are opening them in order that we receive them. 4 to 6 weeks."
February 2020: Are were being processed? No. We are handling birth certificates for living people first because they need them. The immediate family will have to wait 4 to 6 months.
March-August 2020: Shut down for COVID. The website contains no updates.
September 2020: "Thank you for contacting the Mayor's office...when processing resumes..."
October 2020: "Yes we found your application, it's all in order, but your uncashed check is stale and we need another to move your application forward..."
November 2020: Our check clears. "4 to 6 weeks..."
December 31, 2020: "Well our systems in customer service can only see back 60 days, if you claim is older than that..." and yet later that day "Your requested information will be ready to be reviewed and will be mailed next week...
ONE YEAR MARK!!!!
January 22, 2021: "Well I don't know who told you that. It's fifteen to seventeen weeks for processing." From when? "When you apply." That was a year ago. "Well then from when we cash your check. And remember, there are people who have real emergencies so they go first."
Second call on January 22, 2021: "Who did you speak to? Is that the name they gave you because we have no one here who has that name... And no, we have no way of knowing when it will ship out..."
This, dear reader, was when I started to feel like I was cracking up. One person says one thing, then someone else says something reasonable, then that person doesn't exist. But wait, there's more:
February 1, 2021: "Well, we received your second check in early October, but we didn't cash it until November so 15-17 weeks from the date it was cashed."
March 1, 2021: "It hasn't been assigned for review."
April 1, 2021: "Well let me send a message to the director's office..."
April 16, 2021: "Your application is complete and ready to ship...."
April 23, 2021: USPS Informed delivery has the document, and it's scheduled to be delivered...
April 26, 2021: The paperwork arrives, BUT is missing our original documents. "Oh, we'll mail them right out to you!"
The good news is that we got the documents. We hung in there and we got them! My tension head is gone, and Sunday, the day I was so worked up over where the documents were was spent puking. All worth it. (But that was a lot of world-class projectile hurling.)
The bad news is, the people of New York City have to live with this. No one should.
Today is warm, the sky clear and gazpacho sounds good. Just not Pepa's recipe with the barbituates in it...
