Ranting for tomorrow

It rained earlier today. I love rain. Well, I love rain when I'm home and not caught in it. Tomorrow I have to go out and get my passport renewed. I hate dealing with Thai bureaucracy. Although they are vastly better trained now than when I first arrived in Thailand, it's not hard to improve when you suck. They were slow, inefficient, dictatorial and downright nasty sometimes. I'm sure not all government officials are like that, but I always seem to find the ones that are. They always look at you like they're so put-upon, as if you're interrupting something so terribly important, when, hello, duh, isn't it their job to be there? And they're such sticklers for silly details!  Once at the post office, I had to post a letter for my maid, and I hate to write out an address in Laos and the guy practically yelled at me for writing, what was in his opinion, a crooked L, making the word Laos unreadable. Right, to him, the fussy jerk! I normally try to keep my temper when dealing with civil servants - hey, they have pretty thankless jobs, and they must deal with all types of creeps - but I just lost it. I started ranting and raving and screaming, and when I'm angry, I don't bother to speak Thai. So, there I was, standing in the middle of a post office, yelling my head off in English, which maybe five people understood, and my mother, who was with me, had to take matters into her own hands and just rewrite the darn thing. And this is one of my better experiences with Thai bureaucrats, if you can believe that. If I didn't need the darn passport, I wouldn't be caught dead going down there.

Final thought: Give me patience and give it to me now.