Post Office Passport Adventure

This past Friday was my errands day. I was taking the morning off to go get my annual physical, and I decided I'd use this time away from work (during business hours!) to apply for a new passport. My reasons for getting the passport again are many-fold:

Business reason: I'm going to the big Microbiology conference in Toronto, and you can no longer go to Canada or Mexico without a passport.

Paranoid reason: I like knowing I can leave the country if I want to.

(Paranoid)^2 reason: Part of my zombie attack survival strategy.

Anyway, I felt oh-so-with-it as I zipped into Walgreens, got my photos taken and grabbed a passport application. Over lunch, I leisurely filled out the form while my too-strong coffee from Starbucks began to take effect. When your eyes start to buzz, you know you've had too much.

Made it to the post office, walk in the door, and see two large--but seperate--lines. "Are you here to get your passport?" a lady behind the counter yells. I nod. "Then you'll be in line behind these nice folks, for a nice long time."

Uh-oh.

The line moves slowly--only two clerks are working on applications, and each takes about 15 minutes. While I shuffle through the line with everyone else, I get the story: apparently it's a school holiday, and so every family that needs passports for the kiddies is here today to get it taken care of. This explains the clusters of families who move up to the counter at once. My luck that it's today I've decided to do the same.

During my 1.5 hour wait in the post office passport line, there were some highlights:

It was entertaining to see every new arrival to the post office's reaction to the huge passport line. A few of them got that look like "oh crap, I should get mine too. Maybe they know something I don't." It seemed like alot of folks felt they'd missed a memo.

The woman in the non-passport line who could not help but express her discontent that her line only had one clerk for awhile. Loudly. All she needed was stamps. I pointed out to her that you could buy stamps from the machine in the lobby, but she apparently had to have a ROLL of stamps. It was clear she felt abused at having to wait for *gasp* fifteen minutes. During one of her b*tch sessions, a postal worker cheerily yelled "HAVE A NICE DAY!" I learned from them that a fist fight broke out in here last week.

I overheard a woman tell her child "Well dear, 'garbaaage' is a fancy way to say 'garbage'."

I'm always interested in human nature, and certainly a big, slow line is a great place to study it. Though my head continued to buzz with all the caffeine, I had plenty of time to look around. After awhile, there was a sense of comradery amongst all of us in the passport line. We'd swap advice and knowledge about the process, and help newcomers find the right line.

Finally, I made it to the front of the line, and my application took all of five minutes. The woman processing it hadn't had a break (or lunch) and had been working for four hours straight. I thanked her as much as I could--those hours must have been awful. She closed her desk after I left.