This week, I’m on the consultant’s version of the Grand Tour: four different companies in one week. I thought I could turn this into some cool bit comparing and contrasting company cultures — the hotshot start-up versus the established blue-chip! The midwestern can-do versus the…ahhhh….sorry, I nodded off there. I got nothing. The only pithy observation I’ve made is that, working from a statistically significant sample of four, I’ve determined that the feminine hygiene brand of choice in corporate America is Tampax.

As I was sitting down to a pretty good dinner tonight somewhere in flyover country, I got a call from Husband who has been holding down the fort admirably in my absence. Apparently, our social worker called this evening saying that our fingerprints were holding up our dossier. We got the notification of our fingerprint appointment about a month ago but were on vacation and haven’t been able to find a convenient Wednesday morning to get them done, Wednesdays being the only permitted make-up day.

I would have made a greater effort, though, had I known the fingerprints were holding up the dossier. The last time we went through this, they weren’t on the critical path, and I somehow missed the change in policy this time around. Husband, shaken in his faith in my adoption process knowledge, questioned the social worker closely, and she admitted she wasn’t sure that our dossier was not sent. But a quick canvass of the Internets has provided some intelligence that the process for our agency may have changed.

Shit. I thought we were two months into our year-long wait, and instead we are three weeks away (next Wednesday plus two weeks and change to get the fingerprints approved and send the homestudy to Korea) from even starting to wait. I could swear I’ve received a document that said, “Your homestudy has been approved on 4/13 and will be sent to Korea…” How could I have missed the “…after your fingerprints are approved” codicil?