Getting my passport was a lesson in schadenfreude, except that I was laughing at my own misery, which is infinitely funnier.
My printer broke a long time ago, so I put a .PDF of my passport application on a flash drive and got an Uber to Kinko’s (or whatever they call it now…). We drive up, and it’s not there anymore. There is an empty parking lot where it and the Rite Aid used to be. I’m thinking to myself, “how is it that you did not know this?” And then I realize that I work so damn much that I hardly ever get to the Metro Station area of Silver Spring anymore, and even closer to never go to that Starbucks, which is the only way I would have noticed the absence. So I do what anyone would do in that situation. Give up completely and try not to cry. Not going to Paris isn’t that bad.
Really? No, not really.
I went to said Starbucks and got some coffee (Christmas Blend is excellent this year) and some bagel bites while I swore a blue streak and tried to figure out what to do next. I decided to just show up at the post office, because the passport office guy might be able to print out my document for me.
I get to the post office and they (rightly) laugh at me. I had to fill out another passport application in pen. Unless I set my mind to it, my handwriting is absolutely unreadable… just a carpal tunnel pile of garbage. I felt ten thousand years old, because who writes with a pen anymore? After a few minutes, though, I got into the rhythm of block capital letters, going slow enough not to agitate my wrist… which, by the way, is really, really, really, slow. On the positive side, because I got to the post office very early, they were able to move my appointment up… which was a very good thing. The guy putting the application together asks for my driver’s license, birth certificate, and pictures.
I told him that I’d put on my appointment that I was taking pictures there. He said, “well, you’re going to have to walk to CVS and get them done there, because our camera is out of film.” I’m sorry, WHAT?
I felt like I was in some sort of time travel nightmare, because it was misting, and as I walked, started raining harder, as if I had to run to get to the current century. I walk into CVS, where the nice clerk takes out a digital camera and snaps two standard-issue ugly government ID pictures… although we had to do them twice because apparently, in passports, you can’t smile. I thought about telling him that wasn’t true, that I was smiling in six of my other ones, but decided against it.
He apologized for not telling me before. I was wearing a DC United soccer jersey and jeans, and I said, “I’m not worried. As you can see, I put a whole lot of effort into this because government pictures turn out badly no matter what I do.” He laughed his ass off and handed me a folder with two pictures that have been approved for use not only with a regular passport, but biometric facial recognition as well. Like everyone else who’s ever had a passport or a driver’s license, I look like a serial killer on morphine.
I walk back through the rain to the post office, where the guy holding my application staples a picture onto it and tells me I’ll have it in two or three weeks. I hand him my debit card and he says, “we only take checks, but you can buy a money order at the desk.”
Let’s do the time warp again……
It’s $1.25 for the money order, and for some reason they start apologizing like it’s an astronomical sum of money, and tell me that if I want, I can walk to 7-Eleven and get one for 65 cents. I tell them I’m pretty sure it’s not going to overdraw my account, and can only imagine what kinds of fresh hell they’ve been through with other customers that they start apologizing beforehand over a dollar and a quarter.
Why didn’t I bring my own check? I literally cannot remember the last time I ordered a box of them.
Mostly because you couldn’t read them anyway.
Stories That Are All True 