Seriously?

Last night I was talking to my sister and I learned that you can buy babies from people called "Baby Brokers."  These are real and surprisingly legal.  Apparently, there are places in the country where it's still 1950 and there are "homes" for girls and young women who are hiding their pregnancies.  These homes are called "Baby Farms" by the adoption community.  Seriously--not joking.  Anyway, if you decide that you want to adopt an infant, you hook up with a Baby Broker and they go out to the open market to all the Baby Farms and they find you the cheapest baby on the market that fits your criteria.  It kind of sounds like buying a used car from CarMax.  Both the Baby Broker and the Baby Farm take a portion of the proceeds and you get a baby.  This probably won't come as a surprise, but non-white babies are sold at a discount.  Again, seriously...  I don't think that we will go the Baby Broker route, however I do want to talk to one (kind of just to say that I did).  Conveniently, there's a Baby Farm just across state lines from me.  My sister said that there is usually a surplus of black babies * and they actually need families to adopt them.  A majority of adoptive parents are white and when they are going the Baby Farm route they usually want something "perfect," hence the discount.  I'm sure there will be more weird things as we go further into the adoption world, but this one seems unbelievable.  However, one of my nieces was left to die in a gutter when she was just hours old, so I guess things like buying black babies on sale really shouldn't surprise me.

I have dreams of a little girl with Afro-puff pigtails, just like I dreamed when I was pregnant.  Is that weird?

At work today I had to move desks.  There are new people coming out of training, so they are reorganizing where everyone sits.  I had just gotten everything situated with my old desk and I was comfortable with the people that I sat near (something that took a long time for me) and now I have all these new people.  Tall Paul (who has to be closer to 7 feet than 6 feet)  is my immediate desk neighbor, and he seems nice enough.  Next to Tall Paul is Anger-Management-Issue Dave.  I don't know Anger-Management-Issue Dave well, however I have been told that he is really distracting, since he has a tendency to bang his fists down on his desk when calls are going well.  So, that's going to be lots of fun.  Tall Paul is so tall, I may just pretend that he is a wall.**

I've also discovered that Dora the Explorer taught me more Spanish that I thought.  Since I've been trained for all the international plans at work, my phone is messed up and I am gated*** to answer the "press 2 for Spanish" calls.  These poor people are so confused.  I have "¿Necesita un traductor?" written out phonetically at my desk and then I say in my horrible accent "un momento por favor," and then I call the AT&T Language Line and pray to get one of my two favorite translators who actually have some financial vocabulary, otherwise things are very hard.  They are trying to fix my phone, but until then I'm doing about 2/3 of my calls in Spanish.  Dora did teach me all the numbers and most of the letters of the alphabet, so I'm good there.  If anyone calls needing a backpack, I'll be set too.  

Now I'm going to go reclaim the Roku and finish watching the BBC series "Sherlock."  The Husband will not be pleased, as he is currently watching "Dr. Who."  However, he's already watched at least 20 hours of "Dr. Who" this week, so it's my turn.  

*There's a sentence I never thought that I would write.
**I did not intend for that sentence to rhyme that much.  
***That's cool call center speak.  Each of our extensions comes with a list of skills in the system and when it works properly, you are only supposed to get calls related to skills that you have.  This reduces the amount of calls that need to be transferred and allows us to resolve the customer's issue in one call.  However, it sucks when your phone is gated improperly.