We took the four younger children for passport renewals, which in this case were treated more like new passport applications because all four of them were under 16 for their first passports. Last time we went through the passport process, in November 2016, it was for all seven of us, and the passport application clerk told me he had never processed such a well-organized group. For years I have treasured that praise in my heart—and, foolishly as it turned out, was hoping for similar praise this time. Instead, I got no praise, I was unfairly rebuked, and I have very low confidence that the passports will be successfully processed.
The clerk (a different clerk) made enough obvious errors (including failing to notice that William is a legal adult and does not have to have a parent involved in his passport application) that it was hard to know if his corrections to my EXTREMELY CAREFUL work (with each person’s triple-checked pile of paperwork carefully sorted and separately binder-clipped) were valid. I had filled out the form online and then printed it; when you use that method (as opposed to filling out the whole form by hand), the site warns you VERY THOROUGHLY that once you print it, you CANNOT make manual corrections; if you find an error, you must go back and start the form over again. The clerk had me make manual corrections. Perhaps the form instructions mean “You may not make manual corrections UNLESS INSTRUCTED TO DO SO BY A PASSPORT ACCEPTANCE CLERK”—but in that case, it should SAY SO. Maybe it DOES say so! Maybe I SKIMMED! All I know is, I incorporated the DO NOT MAKE MANUAL CORRECTIONS information, and then was told to MAKE MANUAL CORRECTIONS.
Furthermore, when having me make manual corrections, the clerk didn’t first tell me that I could only draw a single line through any information I was correcting. So when I scribbled something out on my first attempt, he WINCED and then had me re-fill out THE ENTIRE FORM BY HAND—which, he was RIGHT that I needed to do that after scribbling, BUT THEN HE SHOULD HAVE FRONTLOADED THE INFORMATION ABOUT THE ONE SINGLE LINE THING. He knows VIVIDLY what the rules are, AND should have extensive experience with all the things that can go wrong; whereas most passport applicants do it only one time every 5-10 years and are NOT as clear on the details. I DID NOT KNOW it had to be one single line!! And what I was scribbling out was an “x” in a box: drawing one single line through one single letter looks ridiculous.
Also, the allegedly incorrect x was one the form put there FOR me, based on other information I provided: I did not put the x in that box. (It was the one about whether the passport is in your possession or being submitted with the application. I wouldn’t have known what box to choose.) And there were many other discrepancies between what the form said/did and what the clerk said/did. The online form said a phone number was optional; the clerk said it was required. The online form said that the name of the student’s school was optional; the clerk said it was required. The form said only that a photocopy of each kid’s and each parent’s driver’s license was required and that both sides of each license had to be on one side of one sheet of paper; the clerk said all relevant licenses for each application had to be photocopied together onto the same page. The clerk may very well have been 100% correct on every single point! But, first of all, it is so irritating/destabilizing when two representatives of the same process seem to offer different information; and second of all, why does this have to be such a baffling bureaucratic ordeal??? especially for a renewal!!! even if the person WAS under 16 last time!!!
All the way home, Paul, who works all day every day with computers and computer programs, was complaining: “WHY do they have you PUT IT INTO THE COMPUTER, then TAKE IT OUT OF THE COMPUTER, then PUT IT BACK INTO THE COMPUTER?? Why is a clerk WRITING CRUCIAL INFORMATION BY HAND onto the form?? Why do they seem to be taking EVERY POSSIBLE OPPORTUNITY to introduce human error into this??”
Well. It’s fine. It’s all fine. If the applications get kicked back, we’ll just go back and fix whatever was wrong, and I will hope for a different clerk.
I think the part that MOST bothers me is that the library where I work is a licensed passport acceptance station, so I could have dealt with my own highly competent and compassionate co-workers—except they are not allowed to process passport applications for family, friends, or co-workers. So we had to drive half an hour away and deal with Mr. No-Praise Wincy Pants.
At Ava’s last passport renewal/STARTING ALL OVER AGAIN process since she was 16 (the last one as a minor THANK GAWD), the passport clerk called me OVER AN HOUR AFTER WE LEFT the office (which was 45 minutes away) to let us know we needed to return over a line-crossing-through “incident.” There’s just no way to expect a good result at these things regardless of hyper vigilance! I mean!
SO FRUSTRATING! I am annoyed over here in Massachusetts.
Let’s use those passports to take us somewhere less frustrating (except, well, still a pandemic and New Zealand isn’t doing as amazingly as it once was..but perhaps just a place with universal healthcare will be sufficient?)
ohhh, look, it let me comment!
IT IS A CHRISTMAS MIRACLE!!
This made me feel all sweaty and nervous in solidarity with you and your careful attention to detail!
Oh my god, the passport office. Back in 2019 I had to renew the boys’ passports and I just went to find the page that I wrote about it. Here is a paragraph:
“But the issue was this: there was a grievous problem with my printer ink, but only on ONE of the applications. There was much discussion around this; would my application be rejected? Forty-five minutes and serious discussion with the supervisor, the supervisor’s supervisor, and a random colleague who “used to work at the passport office itself,” the answer was it will probably be okay. “I mean, we just can’t say for sure. We just don’t know WHAT Ottawa will do.” David said to me very earnestly, which I feel is not just a comment about the passport office, but on the government as a whole. I had to be pretty zen about the thing, including when they suggested that I could drive downtown to the Harry Hays building, which would be quite the undertaking with all the downtown construction and road closures, then I would have to find and pay $25 for parking, walk several blocks with my then-very-painful hip, and wait in a lengthy lineup, but I WOULD find out FOR SURE if the printer ink was a deal-breaker. Well, I opted not to do that because I had to work, and also by this point I felt like I was about to lose my mind.”
THE PRINTER INK WAS WRONG! But happily, the passports were renewed and I didn’t have to do it again. I hope for similar luck for you.
I had a legit public tantrum when I took our family to get the kids’ passports removed. Like, I had to leave the office and my husband had to tag in so that I would not get arrested. It was not my finest moment, but I still feel completely justified in my outrage with both the clerk and the process.
LOL renewed, not removed.
Haha, I was reading the original comment and wondering who… or where… you got them removed from :D
I never expected to say this, but Paul is right. About the “why are they introducing so many possibilities for human error” thing, specifically; from a comp sci point of view and from a sheer sanity point of view, it is Bad.
I hope the passports all go through successfully for you! Now not looking forward to getting my passport, but maybe our local post office will do better with it than your Local Bureaucracy? (I had one, but it expired too-long-ago to get a renewal…)
This sounds maddening — MADDENING! Why?! WHY?! Things should work as they are supposed to, rules should be consistent, staff should adhere to those rules and/or explain CLEARLY and KINDLY the reason behind any deviation! Argh! ARGH!
I had to close my eyes for a few seconds — Serenity Now — after the last paragraph. I get it, I do. But. SO VERY ARGH.
Do you have to go in person for minor passports?
I’ve always done the form online, shoved everything in an envelope, and then in 6 weeks get the old passport back with holes punched into it and a new passport in the mail.
The clerk sounds like more trouble than it’s worth but maybe you have to do this with kids?
Minors need to be renewed in person with both parents present (or a notarized affidavit if one parent cannot be there). I literally had to take my kids out of school and my husband had to take time off from work for the miracle of renewal to happen in our town.
Ah thanks for explaining Stephanie.
Sorry all who have to go thru this. Sounds awful!
Oh, how frustrating. I’m sorry. I hope the applications get processed and that you get the passports without further ado.
In the pre-pandemic era, we had a trip abroad coming up and realized our ~12 year old’s passport was about to expire days before we were scheduled to depart. Yikes! We ended up paying largish sums of money to an expediting company that felt (to us) sketchy and inappropriate but actually worked wonderfully. Phew! But, I do not recommend this approach.
Oh! And apropos of nothing, but an idea I had that might have some use to others — we hosted Thanksgiving this year and, unsurprisingly, I had a running mental list of “things to do differently next time.” (Fortunately these were of the “make cranberry sauce a few days before Thanksgiving” sort and not the “never invite Uncle Billy to anything ever again” sort).
So — rather than just forget these, uselessly, I put them in an email and have scheduled said email to be delivered to myself, in early November 2023. Can’t hurt, might help.
Sounds brilliant. Let us know if you got it next year and it didn’t get caught in spam filter!
Ha, will do! I’ve done similar before (email myself reminders, that is, more in the remember-to-send-brother-a-birthday-card frame) with shorter time frames and those have worked, so I’m optimistic.
I use that for the house air filter swap dates, because no, we will not be randomly thinking of changing the air filters in mid-October and an email reminder does the trick. Probably some people use calendars but…
This is of no help to you, but in praise of public libraries, the passport office at my library was SUPER helpful and lovely to work with.
That reminds me of the passport renewal fuckery I had to go through with my twins over the summer. I had to make an appointment at the local post office, and the available times were pretty limited. We had to work around the kids’ work schedules, as well as our own. Made one appointment – canceled that morning because the passport agent was sick. Made a second appointment – again, canceled that day because the ONE PERSON who could help us was still sick. I made the third appointment at a different, farther-away post office instead. It wasn’t canceled! Hooray! Oh, but one kid didn’t have their driver’s license yet, so that somehow messed everything up for her. We had the exact same paperwork for each kid (because twins), except for that. And the passport agent said we couldn’t come back after the kid had gotten her license in the next couple of days – we had to submit everything That. Day. So, to make up for not having a driver’s license, I had to run home to get a school ID and the kid’s birth certificate out of our safe deposit box. Why did I need two new things to make up for the lack of one thing? I still don’t know. It took extra time to process that kid’s passport renewal, but it eventually came through. She passed her driving test just fine a day or two later. Lesson: it’s much easier to do the minor-over-16 renewal process if the kid has a DL.
Passport renewal (especially for kids under 16!) is like a perfect storm of many ticky-tacky bureaucratic details theoretically needing to be EXACTLY so, but it’s not like those details are checked by a computer, which would flat out reject or accept, instead the details are reviewed, many times on multiple levels, by human beings who may each have their own interpretation of what is Allowed and Not Allowed! If Joe gets the application, and had his coffee that morning, they could sail through. But maybe then Joe’s boss Judy looks at them and she is a real stickler about the no strike-through a rule AND maybe her dog is sick or her feet hurt and BOOM, rejected.
Best of luck with the renewals!! You did your best and it’s completely out of your hands!!
May the gods of annoying paperwork and bureaucracy bless your applications! They will take kindly to your sacrifices of time and patience with annoying clerks and you will be rewarded with nice new passports very soon!
We had to get Juliette’s renewed recently, and it was such an annoying pain in the butt. One of my State Dept friends said that the passport & visa offices are one of the few publicly-funded (or, partially reliant on profit?) areas of the state dept, so when covid hit and all travel stopped, they shut down like 80% of passport-processing. And there hasn’t been nearly a big enough resurgence to re-hire/re-fund the departments back up to pre-covid levels. So! extra long wait times; extra annoyed employees; all the fun things.
That’s enraging.
Maddening! I hope they go through despite the clerk’s corrections. I recently renewed my passport through the mail, and though it went fine, I went into it annoyed because the photo clerk at Walgreens made me tuck my hair behind my ears. I hadn’t planned on this, so it looks stupid. This on top of how there’s no smiling/headwear/glasses etc etc. Next I bet they will make you shave your head.
We got passports for everyone, and now two kids are over 18, so it’s time to get Real ID licenses for those two kids! I’m hoping they’ll be able to navigate that process on their own, but I know that’s a pipe dream.
I’m dual Canadian American citizen living in the US and the last time I had to renew my Canadian passport it got shunted to some trainee in the “international passport fulfillment center” (or whatever it’s called), they kept sending it back claiming I had made a mistake. The third time I sent it in, I was at home on a Friday night and I got a call at ten o’clock from a blocked number that I almost didn’t answer. it was a Canadian passport agent telling me I had neglected a crucial piece of information and from her description I knew to say “turn the paper over” and she paused and said “….oh”. I got my passport within the week. THIS REALLY HAPPENED. At ten on a Friday.
My husband passed when my children were under 16 and I had to get passports for them. The clerk without even thinking said crankily to me “you need two parents, present”, I responded ‘their father couldn’t be here, I have his death certificate” she changed her tone immediately, but I was still very annoyed and dismissive towards her the rest of the procedure. I’m still pretty salty about it, all these years later.
I WOULD DIE STILL SALTY