Busy Day in Bureaucrat Land

Busy Day in Bureaucrat Land

Hubby’s and my passports need to be renewed. I called the number in the phone book and a robotic voice answered. I still find it weird speaking to a robot, but I did. Supposedly, if the computer understood my accent, I should get the renewal forms on an unknown date. This is not good enough because we may need our passports in the very near future. Someone told me that the post office handles passport renewals. Since on all previous attempts, no human ever answered the phone at our local post office, Hubby and I drove there. A clerk said they did not have the forms and directed us to the main post office – 20 miles away – to get the forms. After waiting on line there, a very nice person pointed to a display. “It’s the purple one,” she said. “You do renewals by yourself via the mail. This line is for new passports.”

Why every post office doesn’t carry the renewal applications remains a mystery.

With the forms neatly tucked into our manila envelope along with our new pictures and old passports, Hubby and I then headed to our local police station for our next errand. For complicated reasons, Hubby needs to legally switch his middle and first names. To do this, he needs to be finger printed. To our amazement, our local police station no longer does finger printing. I wondered what they did when they arrested people but refrained from asking. The clerk sent us to a sub-station several miles away. We got there to discover they aren’t allowed to do finger-printing for name changes. She told us we had to go cross-town – near the main post office – to a special office that handles finger printing for people that want their name changed. She said there was no logical reason, but “them’s the rules.”

By then it was almost dinnertime. Hubby and I realized we had shared another “welcome to life as a retiree” moment. We spent the entire day in the car doing errands and accomplished virtually nothing. Oh well, at least we have what to do tomorrow. Hopefully, after he gets the finger printing taken care of, the local courthouse clerk will not tell us we need to go to D.C. to deliver the forms – or back to the Bronx where he was born.