Swine Flu Fiasco

With the swine flu epidemic on everyone's mind, we jumped at the opportunity to get the kids vaccinated at the local school. Of course, we can never do things the easy way, and it turned into a complete circus, but what else is new? Chalk it up to life with only one car.

We had intended on getting everyone vaccinated, but understood that the vaccine was in short supply. Our good friend CH, who seems to be always be up on the latest happenings around town and is a constant fountain of information, told me on Tue (or was it Mon? or Fri?) that they were giving them to kids at the school, but the deadline to submit parental consent was that day. Not only did I not have the forms, but I couldn't get them there on time.

CH offered to stop by and take us over there and then we could do everything in person, but I figured there had to be an easier (or harder?) way. So I called the school and they said the forms were available on their website/newsletter, which BTW we do not receive. I went to the site and poured over the newsletters, downloading several PDFs, some of which were huge and bogged down my computer. It turns out that none of them were the consent forms. So I called the school and spoke with HP, who for the record was incredibly helpful and nice, and she said she'd email the form to me.

What I ended up doing was downloading the forms and printing them. I then filled them out, signed them, then scanned them back into my computer. The problem is that they were in JPEG format, and not everyone can open JPEGs. I had to convert them into PDFs, but in order to do that, I had to resize and reformat them, then convert them into a PDF. How's that for jumping through hoops?

I then emailed it to AH, but of course, that would have been too easy if it all worked out. She said she wasn't receiving it, but that maybe the attachments slowed the process. She was kind enough to say she'd call me when she got it and take it to the nurse.

About an hour later, she called and said, "The eagle has landed," thus ending our swine flu fiasco. I think my neurotic handling of the situation (I must have called them twenty times) must have caused quite a commotion in the office, because I saw the principal of the school a few days later (he's SG, a fantastic guy) and he asked if we'd straightened out all of our vaccine issues, so he was clearly aware of what was going on. Such is the life of a SAHD, always making his mark. Veni. Vidi. Vici.

Until the next time, thanks for reading, and thanks to Brian Hoskins for the pic.