Passport Problems

07-09-2011

I finally got my new passport today, after a bit of an adventure with the whole renewal process. With the exception of two very helpful people it appears that everyone that works in the Passport Office/Department of Foreign Affairs are lazy wastes of space that should have been fired years ago.

But they never will be.

During the last two weeks I have learned the following about the Passport Office.

1) The tracking website is, at best, a bunch of lies. I have my passport in my hand. New and unused, yet the site still has my application listed as "In Progress".

2) It is a total fabrication that the process should take six weeks. For starters how can a six week turnaround time be reduced to ten working days if you pay an extra fee? Plus the British Passport Office can issue a new password in a week and they have more people applying. The claim that it is a "complicated" document doesn't really hold water in this digital age.

3) Despite it taking six weeks they will give you an "Issue" date and still print it whenever the hell they want. I was meant to be issued my new passport on August 31st. It is now September 7th. If the "Issue" date was even remotely true then the passport would be printed/valid from that date or just before. Mine was printed today, seven days late.

4) People in the Passport Office, bar two, are less than helpful and will fall back on a default response rather than listen to you. Yesterday I told the woman in Customer Service that the passport was late and the tracking site said it was due on the 31st. Her very next sentence was "Have you checked the tracking website?". Lucky for her there was protective glass between us or death would have happened.

5) Passport Express is a myth if you post in your application. Despite it not saying this anywhere on the form you have to hand your application in at a Post Office or Passport Office desk for Passport Express to happen on the application. If you tick the box and post the application in it just defaults to Ice Age slow. But they don't say that on the form.

6) Information on the tracking website does not match information on their internal computer systems. Yesterday the useless drone told me that my passport was being "Checked" (whatever the hell that means) but the tracking site still had it as "In Progress". Even though the site has a list of states your application can be in and "Checked" was one of them.

7) Apparently the reason for the delay was that the Passport Office gets four thousand applications a day. This seems a little high to me. Taking out weekends that would mean in a year they process 1040000 passports. In four years that's 4160000. Ireland's population is just over the four million mark and a passport last ten years. So in four years the Passport Office will, according to their own stats, be no longer needed for the rest of the decade. The only way these figures make sense is if everyone who had a ten year passport had it expire this year. Even if you had people loosing passports or filling them up with stamps from frequent travelling it seems a lot on the high side.

Bottom line I have learned some valuable lessons. Apply early is one. Apply in person is another. That the entire section could be replaced and made more productive, but sure that was obvious. Now roll on the holidays.

Blue_jester

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