Bureaucratic fun

So we’re going to Mexico on Sunday. It’s a really good trip. Gordon actually left Wednesday morning, he’s going to drive to San Diego, meet up with his friend Sean, and then they’re going to drive on down into Baja, past a town called Loreto. We’re going to camp, kayak and so forth, so that’s why he’s driving, to take all the stuff in his truck. Aisling and I are going to fly down on Sunday, along with Sean’s wife, Jenny. Now when we planned this trip, we noted that Aisling’s passport had expired, so we applied for a new one in January, which is in plenty of time, based on their information, for this trip. Well what I didn’t know is that the travel laws have changed, requiring passports to Canada, Mexico, Aruba and other places, so the system is quite overloaded. Our trip was approaching, and the passport hadn’t arrived. I checked the status on line, it just said in process. So I began to panic last week, two weeks before our flight, and started calling their toll-free number. It took me about five days to get through. Now to be fair, I wasn’t being that persistent, probably only calling 15-20 times per day. I finally got through on Friday. The person I spoke to told me that the passport was in the San Francisco office, and that she would mark it “expedite” and “will call”. She told me that if I didn’t hear by Tuesday to call back. Well, guess what, I didn’t hear by Tuesday! By this time I had figured out how to get through on the toll free number, so Wednesday morning, I called, spoke to a person who told me he was making an appointment for me at the passport office for 9 on Thursday and that he would email me a confirmation. Of course, the email never arrived, I got up Thursday morning at 5:30, called them, and got a different story, that they don’t email appointment confirmations etc. etc. By this time, I had pretty much decided I was coming in to the passport office no matter what anyone said. So I gathered all my documents and headed in.

I arrived at the building at 8:30 to find three different lines, each about a block long. I finally figured out which line to get into – the “pending” line – and waited. I waited in line outside until 11:00. Everyone in the line had a similar story to mine. There were people who were leaving that evening, or the next day, people who had been there earlier in the week and were just coming back to pick up their passports. I was so happy to get in the building at 11:00, that I didn’t care that all they did was put me in another line to get a number. I was in that line for about 30 minutes. Then they gave me a number – 195. They were on number 120 when I got the number. But at least I could just sit on the floor and wait. So I did, until about 2. After all this hassle, when I got up there at two, the guy was great. He said, yes, here’s your application, it’s not processed yet, but we’ll do it today, and you can pick it up after 3:30. I could leave the building and come back at 3:30 if I wanted. By that time, I would have been terrified to leave the building, thinking I would have had to wait in line just to get back in. Instead, I hung around until 3:30, got in line again, in fact I was first in line, and actually got the passport at 3:45. That’s just over seven hours waiting in line for Aisling’s passport, after I had applied for it in plenty of time for the trip. But it was better than canceling the trip, or having to return the next day for pickup so I was happy enough with it. I just hope the trip is worth it!

The moral of the story is probably pretty obvious. Apply for your passport in plenty of time, way ahead what they tell you is needed! The other moral of the story is how people really bond when they're forced to go through something unpleasant together, for hours at a time. I made several new best friends in line! When I finally got Aisling's passport, I actually got applause!