Thursday, February 20th, 2020 @ 11:23 AM CST
McDonald’s ---- tucked into a Walmart
San Antonio, Texas
I have made seven hundred and seventeen TikTok videos. I film one when I see an interesting subject and I film and talk for thirty seconds, if not a few seconds more. I had a few run for a thousand or two thousand views. I like to take time to reply to comments. It builds an audience. Dane Cook the comic and Swoon the artist have become well known for engaging fans through the comments. And then, I finally posted a video that has screen sixty-four thousand times since late Wednesday morning.
Finally, I was TikTok famous.
I was lost in an office park, looking for the fingerprinting office. The location of the office should have been obvious. I reread the directions and realized I had walked right on by it once. Before backtracking, I stared at a yellow building, wondering if it were a banquet hall.
The sign out front read BioBridge Global, the parent company of the South Texas Blood and Tissue Center. Alamo Federal Credit Union, building its brand, had an architect design a replica. I had visited the Alamo so I knew that this replica looked cleaner and brighter and neater than the fortress downtown. I made a short video, chatting it up in a silly way. I vamp and hope the results make sense.
People seemed to like it, but I think the awesome music on Pontiex really made the video happen. The band truly captured the disaster of the uneven battle that left two hundred leading Texans dead. I’ll reach out to the band and thank them for free use of their music. I hope more people take notice of the band, book them and buy their music.
I made my way down to the fingerprinting office, a firm called IdentoGO. I have been to their office three times in Muskegon. One day, I went to their office in Muskegon to be fingerprinted twice for two different guest teaching companies. In Michigan at that time, school districts couldn’t share fingerprint checks. Thank goodness the two districts agreed to pay for the printing. I just had to show up with my fingers.
I was fingerprinted for the first time for a teaching job in Florida. I went to the Warren Police Office and the prints were made by a trained fingerprint technician who took control of my hands and rolled my digits and thumbs in ink, then rolled them onto a form. The Detroit Public Schools required me to get printed by their in-house bureau, right on Woodward across the famous Little Rock Baptist Church. I never heard about the results, but I had nothing possibly on my record. In the year 1988 fingerprints were still making the transition from paper to digital formats.
People have gone in for fingerprinting and surprising warrants had been found on their record. In Texas, a warrant can spring up for minor causes. I’ve been pulled over for speeding a few times. In Michigan, the fine has to be paid in a timely fashion. The Secretary of State has the power to deactivate ones driver’s license. Trust me, the Secretary of State makes this an expensive status to correct. However, one call to a service bureau to pay the hefty fine turns the license back on active status. In Texas, the Justice of the Peace has the power to issue a bench warrant for arrest if a ticket goes unpaid. I got one and only one ticket for driving without a seatbelt on the Fourth of July in McKinney, Texas. When I saw the harsh penalty for non-compliance, I went straight to the office on the Fifth of July to pay in cash.
I have not fingerprinted well on the digital systems. I could see my tech begin to sweat as my thumbs then my digits required three or four tries to register. It hurt to let him control my fingers on the flat digitizer, but I really wanted the results.
I hope the results of the background check using the fingerprints come through soon. An all-clear from the Texas Department of Public Safety will complete my file. I wonder what it will be like to teach children in Texas. I’m betting that the children in the Latino classrooms will be amazingly well behaved.
I just worry , however, if the schools will make use of too many guards. It seems everywhere I go in Texas I see a small private police force keeping an eye on things. When I got to the fingerprint office, ten men in fresh uniforms were having their prints taken. Because guards can easily call the sworn deputies, the guards have power equivalent to what Patrick McGuire called a State Boy or a County Boy. Patrick McGuire talked that way because his father drove truck when he wasn’t raising cattle or sowing corn
FitMC had to get his face out into the open:
Pontiex, the Alamo
About the Replica Alamo built by Alamo Federal Credit Union
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