A peculiar embarrassment

Today was one of those days when I'm required to fill out great piles of forms so various relevant people (or computers) can decide whether or not I should be getting food & medical care. It's a nuisance, but it's one you can... no, I think "It's a nuisance" sums it up pretty well, really.

But something happened today which hasn't happened to me before when filling out forms. My right hand decided it didn't want to write anymore. Oh, it would hold the pen and scribble on the paper just fine--but it wouldn't make actual, legible letters. (As I don't write by hand much these days, I can't tell you if my manual misbehavior was unusual or not.) Since my ambi(non)dexterity does not extend to writing, this meant that these lovely piles of papers could not be filled out by me.

Well, the "Customer Service Representative" was kind enough to write the proper answers in the forms I should have been filling out, just as long as I told him what to write and scrawled my autograph in the appropriate boxes (today I have a doctor's handwriting! woo!). Much of what he wrote was simply copied from the forms I filled out last year. As those of you who were around last year might remember, I was rather depressed. What I mean to say is that there's really nothing quite like the peculiar flavor of the embarrassment you feel as you watch someone carefully and painstakingly writing out for official business the stuff you spewed out a year ago whilst wallowing in angst and woe.