Canada is wary of the Strugglebucket

I have a summer job I absolutely love; it sends me all over the country to set up interesting workshops, I get to work with great people, and frequently Delta and Denver team up to force me into visiting one of my best friends and her husband for an evening. But that's another story.

My last week working this summer was up in Calgary, which is beautiful and really a friendly place, but it took an extra fifteen minutes or so to get there than it really should have.

A harrowing, anxious-making fifteen minutes, wherein customs sent me to immigrations.

Travel to Canada wasn't always this terrifying, but that's what national paranoia will do to you. General customs procedure now goes like this: on the plane, the flight attendant will hand you a form to fill out and will assume you have a pen with which to do so. If you don't, it's just too damn bad for you and you get stuck writing in pencil against a textured wall in the hall of the Calgary International Airport on the way to customs.

On this form, among questions about how much cash or biological matter you are bringing into the country, there are three small boxes denoting possible reasons for visiting Canada:

STUDY
PERSONAL
BUSINESS

In my pencil-on-textured-wall haste, I marked "personal" for honestly I have no idea what reasoning. I was technically there on business, but it's only four days of administrative assistant work, and part of that time we had a trip planned to Lake Louise so I figured--no, hell with it, I wasn't figuring anything, I was just exhausted.

So by the time I got to the front of the line and slapped my now faintly perforated customs form on the officer's desk, I was tired and sweaty and no doubt my hair was thoroughly ruffled and by and large I probably looked pretty grungy and disgruntled. At this point in the summer, the novelty of twice-weekly air travel had worn off in favor of great annoyance, and I just wanted to get to my hotel room and collapse on the cool, smooth expanse of king-size bed.

I honestly couldn't tell you what went wrong in the conversation, but obviously I couldn't defend my "personal" reasoning then any more than I could now, and it seemed fishy enough to send me to immigrations.

The immigrations office itself is set behind rather ominously frosted glass, and the only other suspect/victim in there was a woman nearly in tears who was talking to someone behind a desk while another officer rifled through her carry-on. I don't do well with new and stressful situations, as you might have gathered by now, so at this point I was not only more and more nervous with each passing moment but also suddenly terrified I had accidentally sneaked some biological matter or another into the country in my backpack (did I finish that bag of raisins before I left Seattle???).

They waved me up to the first available officer. Firstly, I noticed the difference in elevation; when you're just speaking to the nice gentleman (or lady) in the customs booth, you are at eye-level and can exchange pleasantries as your passport is being stamped. In immigrations, the rather more gruff-looking gentleman (or lady) is set at a desk a full foot/roughly-third-of-a-meter higher than you. (I work with math teachers, and we all spent the whole time we were there trying to think in metric conversions, with very little success all around.)

So they took an extra long time now looking at my passport and asking me vague questions about my work. I travel with all my plane/hotel/taxi/shuttle information in one folder so I can't possibly end up lost (knock on wood), and I just handed it all over to the man, including offering to call my emergency contact in California if it would just get me out of there not in handcuffs. Such is the measure of my paranoia.

I wonder now if they put an additional "Looked suspicious initially" stamp in there, tainting my permanent record... I should go look.

Nope, no special "shifty-looking" stamp I can find. Maybe it's in black-light ink. Damn.

In the end, they let me go with the advice that next time I should put "business." And so I shall. Twenty bucks (Canadian dollars) says next year I put "business" and they pull me anyway.

To add insult to anxiety, everyone else in our group--the people actually working the full 8 days--put "personal" and didn't have a problem.

A last note: Canada is nationally bilingual, and as such they have customs forms in French as well as English. I briefly considered filling mine out en Francais, but decided against it in the end. Thank God, else the whole of this awkward situation would have been in French.