It may quickly resolve itself when they figure out they don’t enough volunteers left to deal with the dogs or the kids.

we’ve got one of those computers at work that you can unlock by letting it read your fingerprint, instead of by typing in a password. fortunately it eventually relents and gives me the option of typing in a password, because it always fails to recognize me in the flesh, as it were. school lunches were bad enough when i was a kid, because i’d probably starve if i had to rely on that technology.

a number of government entities have my fingerprints on file too, but there’s at least one fewer than there used to be. i called up one of my former employers not too long ago, in the course of a job hunt, only to find out that all records of my existence got washed away by ivan. ordinarily i’d have cheered at that bit of news because i’ve heard way too much of this is going into your permanent record in my life, but it would have been useful to be able to prove that i’d held that particular job.

the one problem i can see with fingerprinting/checking only the volunteers that would be working with kids is that in a number of volunteer organizations, everyone wears several different hats, walk the dogs today, work with the kids tomorrow, answer the phones the next day, etceterblah etceterblah etceterblah .

The talk about fingerprints is really absurd. Maybe they missed it, but the government just paid Brandon Mayfield $2 million after screwing up the fingerprint identification on the Madrid Bombing.

It took me 6 weeks to get anything back from the Feds on fingerprints, and these were criminal investigations. At one point the Feds told me my personal fingerprints weren’t on file, when in point of fact they were in the military file, the top secret security clearance file, the police academy graduate file, the New York concealed weapons permit file, as well as a couple of other places for various licenses, permits, etc. The damn system was awash with copies of my fingerprints and they couldn’t find any of them?!

You pay for these requests and they take forever. This is an excellent way to chase off volunteers while wasting a lot of money.

i thought of the dog fighters and the med schools and the animal experimenters too, and my first reaction was um, y’all are just going to kill all the surplus dogs anyways, so take a chance on finding the next michael vick.

but i see that the article says that all volunteers who work in youth-oriented programs have to undergo the background checks. one of the trends in animal shelters now is to get kids involved in stuff like dog walking, which is terrific. i’d hate to see that scuttled.

much as i like kids though, i like dogs better. can’t we just once in a while do less “for the children” and more for the dogs? instead of doing full background checks, they could just get a volunteer to look through some online sexual predator databases [don’t get me started on those] since that’s all they’re really worried about.

Doing background checks for dog-walkers is world class stupidity.

I have a horrible feeling they we are going to find out that this is somehow linked to Homeland Security money, like a lot of other stupid ideas.

But agreed on the road blocks deal. Surely they would notice when Bill came back to the shelter without the dog, and not let him walk dogs again.