Roy and I boarded a plane to Washington and once we arrived, we joined the other travelers in the customs queue. Like most international airports, there is a line for residents and a line for everybody else. The two queues seemed to both be quite full at the start but after a while, we noticed that the resident line was empty and the foreigners line was just as full as it was at the start.
An hour passed and we were almost halfway through the queue. People around us were starting to get restless (not as restless as I expected mind you) and children were starting to cry and act up. We continued to wait another hour and it seemed like the line wasn't moving nearly as fast as it should have been. There were many empty desks that could have been opened up to make the process much quicker and much less frustrating but they kept us waiting. Eventually, after many complaints from various people, they let the foreigners go through the residents section since there was nobody waiting in that line.
It seemed that we had finally made it through the process once we had given over our fingerprints and received our passports back - we were free to go. Or so we thought... Once we got to the exit, we handed over our customs form and were told - rather rudely, that we were to go to another desk. It seemed that there was a problem. Someone who we were traveling with made it through fine so he told us that he would wait for us. We went to this other desk, handed over our customs form along with our passports and were told to take a seat and 'someone will be right with you'. We knew then that it wouldn't be a fast process, so we parked our tired and somewhat frustrated arses on a seat and looked around the room wondering why we were there. I thought it night have been because Roy was looking rather shifty and they didn't like the look of him. :-P
It seemed that we didn't really fit the character profile of the rest of the people who were waiting in the room. But we waited. An hour later, a border officer picked up our passports, casually strolled to his desk, laughed and joked about with his colleague (prolonging the already long and extremely annoying process) and he finally called our names. He asked us why we were coming to the States to which Roy responded that he was here for a biometrics conference. The officer stamped our passports and sent us on our way. Roy asked him why we had to go through this extra step and the officer told us that the biometric system where we had to get our fingerprints scanned, had malfunctioned. So rather ironically, we were forced to wait for 3 hours because of bad biometric machines.
We met our fellow traveller who patiently waited for us outside for an hour and got the shuttle to our hotel. It wasn't a very nice welcome to the US but in hindsight it was quite funny considering the circumstances.
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