Ohhh, Mary. Mary, Mary, Mary.... Mary, Mary, Mary, Mary, Mary, Mary, Mary.
Mary, quite Contrary.
Mark my words, I will fucking destroy you.
As many of you know, Julien is working towards his immigration into the United States of America, Land of the Free, Home of the Brave. As part of his journey into Americanhood, we have taken on an immigration lawyer. The lawyer is fine, whatever. He's a little brusque, and somehow Julien always comes away from our meetings understanding three times more than I do even though they're held in his second language, but he's more accustomed to dealing with bureaucratic bullshit than I am, so that's reasonable. Again, whatever. My beef is with his motherfucking clerk, Fucking Mary, who I feel comfortable pinning as the worst person I have ever met in my life. I'm actually pretty sure her first name is actually "Fucking Mary" because there is no other way to refer to her.
I hate this woman. I hate her so much, guys.
First off, let's just begin with her office. The entire complex is a little run-down and cluttered, sort of like a Film Noir detective's office when he just moves in and has no time for yer lily-footed feather-dusting, because he's got murders to solve and dames to forcibly kiss. This office doesn't have quite the level of urgency as all that, so it's more like old cases are just quietly rotting in the piles of boxes that form a winding pathway through the cubicles.
Fucking Mary. She has her own office for some god-damn reason, and it is absolutely wallpapered in full-page print-outs of horrible, random, repetitive photos of her ugly and terrible child. The roly-poly little rat is pictured in many of the photos wearing a grey velour sweatsuit, because that's exactly the kind of thing terrible people stuff their ugly children into. I mean, I guess track suits are comfortable for kids or whatever, but grey? You don't put a kid in the color grey unless you hate that kid, or you're so devoid of interest or passion yourself that grey is the sort of color you see and think "well, it's a little too bubbly for my taste but for a child it's fine." Also, I'm using the term "wallpapered"quite literally here: the printed-out pages (of course the ink is running dry in most of them, because why make the effort to change the fucking cartridge for something you and your clients have to look at every single day?) line the wall from floor to ceiling, layered in the way that psycho-killers layer photos of their potential victims from the floor to the ceiling. It is exactly that kind of creepy. Who knows if it's even her child? I certainly didn't ask.
When the lawyer showed us to her office, he actually had to pick up a stack of rotting boxes himself and move them out of the room so he could fit another chair in front of her desk, while she just sat and watched this old man that she works for lift heavy things. She then proceeded to absolutely suck at taking basic information from a human, which sharp minds will note is the only fucking thing she ever has to do in her entire job description. Between misspelling every place-name, even after it's been spelled painstakingly several times by both Julien and myself, then misunderstanding the most basic and simple facts of life, she is actually slightly less useful than a broken Esperanto version Speak-N-Spell in terms of filing immigration paperwork: infuriatingly repetitive, disconcertingly inhuman, and somehow more confusing than if we did the whole thing in Russian.
Then she had the kindness to list all of the reasons Julien was going to be deported and probably also beaten and arrested for daring to apply for citizenship. She listed all of these reasons in the sort of lilting valley-girl voice reserved for the likes of Cher Horowitz, despite being a grown-ass adult with a fat and ugly child. She's a perfect storm of gratingly annoying and defeatist-by-proxy. I swear no one has enjoyed giving bad news so much since the Marquis de Sade announced his pending prison sentence to himself in the mirror.
Also, she has the human interaction skills of an annoying, prying child. When she got distracted during the interview process and began asking personal questions that happened to be a painful topic for me, she followed it up with this maddening, unrelenting series of "why? but why? why? why? why not? why?", that I seriously thought for a second that I'd died and fallen into some sort of Hell of Repetition. She actually sat there and made me cry with frustration, then with an entirely blank look on her face, as she stared at me like a dog stares at its owners playing chess, without comprehension or relation, she waited a beat and then, without a hint of irony, was like "yeah, but... why?" Which was when my brain switched off. That's it, and now I'm unsuccessfully climbing over Julien and precariously stacked bunch of immigration claims from the 1980s to get to the door, shouting through tears about how we're just going move to god-damn France, then, as I try to free one of my feet from a moldy box I've stepped in.
She's in the office a grand total of two and a half hours per day, and most of that is spent adding more curling, yellowed scotch-tape to the printer pages that are coming undone on her wall. We know that she's in the office for two and a half hours, because we've been forced to graph her in-office hours on several charts in order to actually get in touch with her at any point ever... you know, about the incredibly time-sensitive documents that she's in charge of, that dictate whether or not Julien can stay in the fucking country. We've actually been at the Starbucks on the corner, after a nine o'clock meeting with the lawyer, and watched her stumble into work at ten-thirty, with a coffee and a danish in hand. Pro tip: when you're already a half hour late for work, you should probably not be holding a coffee and a danish, especially when you're already a drooling fucking idiot.
I know that she's supposed to be in at ten because after weeks of "just missing" her when we were calling about the status of Julien's working papers, we finally started to take note of the times when we actually could call her. Those times are precisely: Ten fifty AM to eleven-thirty AM, after she's crawled late into work, forged a path through her rotting boxes of casework to her disgusting grimy desk with empty yogurt containers all over it and settled herself in for twenty minutes but before she takes her three-hour lunch break at eleven-thirty to buy more danishes and yogurt spoons, because she definitely isn't washing any of them so she just has to buy more. You can also sometimes reach her from two thirty to three forty-five (before she leaves for the day), if she didn't take her afternoon to rummage through the dumpsters outside of the apartments of short, fat Italian-American middle-aged men that just lost a lot of weight to find more industrial-colored track suits for her spawn.
We had a specific issue with our immigration papers, in that we moved from one apartment to another in the middle of the process, so we made it deadly clear to Goddamn Fucking Mary that since her department receives a notification whenever the government mails the paperwork to us, she absolutely must call us to tell us so we can make sure we've received it in one of the two mailboxes because otherwise Julien might get deported. Now, reader, I know you're a sharp pencil. Can you tell me what happened every single motherfucking time paperwork was mailed to us? That is correct, I would pick up the phone after having nervously checked with my roommates in my old apartment and run to pick up the papers that had been sitting there for three days, and pleasantly remind Mary what a waste of air and natural resources she is. She would then, without fail, oh yeah! remember to tell me about the last piece of paperwork that she forgot to tell me about, which we had picked up two weeks prior and notified her about at the time. She'd then remember the last phone call, and so on until we all die of confounded stupidity. We're all dead, of stupidity, and it is Motherfucking Mary who has killed us.
