Slate has published an unbelievable first-person account of one man's struggle to get a U.S. passport. Could be yet another ho-hum tale of a huddled mass member yearning to be free and live the American dream except for one thing: The man in question, Bruce Reed, is in fact an American citizen and is merely trying to get his own passport--and those of his family--renewed in time for a planned trip to Australia. That sort of thing used to take a few weeks; now, with the new passport requirements that mandate U.S. citizens have a passport if they're flying to Mexico, Canada, or the Caribbean, it can take not just months but many months. Sometimes longer.
Reed and his family applied--and paid--for rush passport delivery a full two months before their departure. It was not enough, not by a long shot. By the day of the intended trip, he still had not received the passports--despite many promises to the contrary by officials staffing the overjammed phone lines--and headed for his last hope: a Washington-based passport office. Here's how he describes it:
The scene bore a passing resemblance to the fall of Saigon. Some people were crying. Others were screaming, either at agents or at the armed guards who herded us from one spot to another until the room became too packed to move. A few travelers were in more advanced stages of resignation, sitting on the floor staring at books of Sudoku or simply praying the dwindling supply of oxygen would hold out long enough.
Hyperbole, surely, but having spent some time in the passport office at the U.S. Embassy in Prague, I'd say it's probably not that exaggerated. He waited nearly three hours before being able to see someone, and that's where I very nearly fell off my chair with mingled laughter and horror:
I reached the caseworker window in a mere 150 minutes, still with a faint hope of making an evening flight. But the agent at Window 8 had other plans. She angrily questioned why I needed a passport that day, when my flight wouldn't land in Australia until two days later. I tried to explain the International Date Line, but she had already reached a verdict: Our passports couldn't possibly be done in time for us to leave, so that meant she had no obligation to complete them. And since the office was closing for the weekend, she gave me a slip to come back for them—on Monday.
Seriously? There is seriously someone working in the passport office who doesn't understand that a flight all the way to goddamn Australia can't be done in a single calendar day? I think that frightens me more than zombie fat and semi drivers yakking on cell phones.
Reading the whole thing gave me an immediate flashback to the hellish bureaucracy that occasionally characterized life in the Czech Republic. The old jokes were that Kafka was a journalist, not a novelist and that the way official things worked in that country was the result of the unholy union between the Austro-Hungarian and Communist bureaucracies. Even so, and maybe this is nearly three years away talking, I don't remember things being as terrible as Reed's passport experience was.
Oh, we had some doozies, for sure. Having to get Connery and me--a scant six days post-partum and only a day after we'd been released from one hospital--to a separate Prague hospital miles across town to undergo blood tests and physical exams to get Connery's insurance stands out as a real low point. Finding out that I had been accidentally living illegally in Prague and would have to pay a fine was another. Still, once you figured out the system, navigating was occasionally time-consuming but not soul-crushing.
I tell you what, U.S. passport office, when you start making me feel nostalgic about Czech bureaucracy, you have a big problem. My passport is up for renewal in 2013. I'd better get on that now.