Last week, we received yet another hand-addressed envelope from the US Citizenship and Immigration Services. This was the I600 approval, dated a scant 3 weeks after our referral and a scantier 2 weeks after submission. I compared this to the paperwork we received for Aitch (I know, don’t compare children! It’s so unfair! And I’m starting already!), and last time it took the government 6 weeks from referral to approval. That’s a fifty percent reduction in approval time from Baby 1 to Baby 2! (Sorry, this week at work we’re doing metrics.)

Anyway, at the bottom of the approval form we found this:



Do you recognize that row of little icons in the bottom right-hand corner? They’re “Wingdings,” that font that generates symbols from keystrokes. Go ahead, open Word, select “Wingdings” as your font, and try it. Exact same symbols, right?

The question is, why is the government using cheesy Wingdings on an official form?

Husband has a theory that the wingdings are a pictographic representation of what you go through in the adoption process. To wit: “You apply to the adoption agency (envelope), then you do the homestudy and they give you the OK to proceed (hand), then you choose a country (flag), then you pay the agency fee (blood drop), then you fill out Package A and Package B and the country-specific package and the I600 (manila envelopes)….” Feel free to finish the rest of the story in your heads.

My theory is that the wingdings are a secret code. Since our government’s track record at keeping secrets is not so stellar, it would probably be a simple cipher–say, a basic substitution of letters for their corresponding symbols.

*N(S0000157229*

Any thoughts?