I’m a 32 year old US citizen born in the USA, to 2 US citizens who were born here, to 4 more US citizens who were born here.
I recently applied for a passport so i can leave the United States and visit someone abroad.
In order to apply for a passport, the passport office insisted that the state department needed to see my flight itinerary, which I can obtain after purchasing plane tickets. So the very first step in this process was to book plane tickets, without a passport.
That’s where it begins to get stupid. In order to make those plane tickets affordable to me, I needed to book them for a specific set of dates, convenient to me, a couple months in advance, which should have been plenty of time for the normal passport application process to take place. Thing is, the range they gave me for how long it normally takes included a time frame of 10 weeks. The 10 week mark was just slightly too long. I can’t fly without that passport.
But the passport office at the courthouse told me I could get the process expedited, by using a third party courier, for an additional expense of 180 dollars, on top of the nonrefundable passport application fee of 170 dollars, 25 dollars for a photo ID that meets their size criteria and so on and so forth.
So I do this, so I’ll get it within 3 weeks. The issue here is that these people don’t do business unless you are within 5 weeks from the travel date, so I had to wait… to expedite the process.
Hold on, don’t zone out yet.
They asked for my driver’s license, social security card, and birth certificate, and documents related to my flight, which I provided them. They’re all in perfect order.
So when all is said and done (not) I’m paying about $400 so far for this passport application, but I have met all their requirements.
So I get an email from the passport office in Miami where this application gets sent to find out my application has been put on hold.
Oh dear me, why?
Because my state issued driver’s license is less than a year old, so now I must provide “5 documents over 5 years old” which include photographs of me or dates and signatures, and they must specifically come from this list:
Bolded are things I can do. Grey are things that are literally impossible. Underlined are things that simply don’t exist for me.
========================
Driver’s license <-----Rejected for being less than a year old.
Learner’s permit <------Because at 32, I’ve got one of those?
School Yearbook photograph <-----Do-able.
US Passport <--------Ummm? This is what I’m applying for, for the first time.
Newspaper articles featuring me from 5 years ago. <-----Nope, they do not exist.
Employment Identification card <-----My employer doesn’t have these
Professional license <-----Also not a thing required for my job
Federal, State, or Municipal ID card <-----Not a thing I have or have ever had. Not impossible for me to have had, I just never had one.
Military ID card <----Not a thing I have or have ever had
Student ID card <-----Not a thing I have or have ever had
Military records <------Not a thing I have or have ever had
Selective service registration card <-----I registered in 2001 but I never obtained a card because I immediately moved, this is technically do-able but it will take too long for me to obtain one.
Union Membership <----- Top 3 pizza chains are McJobs, they will fire you at will if you so much as mention the word union.
Welfare Card <----I work for a living.
Marriage Certificate <-----Not yet. Not impossible for me to have, but sorry, hasn’t happened yet.
Medical records <----Except for traffic accident that occurred less than 5 years ago, no medical records because I never go to the doctor, it’s not affordable.
Children’s birth certificates <-----Not yet
Social Security Card <-----Yes, I already provided you this.
**Traffic Ticket **<------Do-able. Very well, you can have this.
If I was raised abroad, I could also… Nope, born and raised here.
=======================
So that would be five, except:
My driver’s license was rejected. Why? Because it isn’t over a year old.
One issue I have with that, is that it is over a year old. It states it was issued in 2013 right there on the front.
Funny story, the old one was confiscated during a very minor traffic stop, and then I went and had to get another one from the courthouse, which required getting my birth certificate sent to me from the state of my birth, because at the time, other than my social security card, I had no form of legal ID because of that driver’s license being confiscated from me.
That driver’s license has the exact same license number as before, as can be seen on the traffic tickets. Same number. 2013 is the date it was re-issued.
Now, I’m not a fancy math scholar or anything, but late 2015 and January 2013 are more than a year apart.
I even got the nice young lady from the passport office in Miami who is just doing her thankless soul-sucking job to admit on the recorded phone call that there was no Earthly reason why my passport application should have been rejected in the first place.
Yes, the passport office *admits *to me that they screwed up, and I should by all rights have my passport in my hands at this very moment.
But now that the thing has been flagged, I am now required to provide this extra layer of identification to the State Department.
I will point out that they are rejecting my very legal and very non-expired, very same driver’s license which I’ve had since well before 2010, based on the fact that it says the issue date is 2013, which meets their requirements to begin with, but I can prove it meets their 5 year requirement, and they still won’t accept it as a legal form of ID.
I will point out that I’ve already provided them my social security card. Now I need five OTHER forms.
Now here’s the problem. I simply do not have those five other documents. Nope! They do not exist.
If you remove the very valid driver’s license and the social security card, which are both very legal and very readily available proof of who I am, I cannot come up with five additional documents.
What I did do was show them my high school yearbook, and an automobile loan document from 2005 which has my signature on it, and a date, and the entire details of the loan, but that’s not on their approved list.
I also showed them that I have had a bank account since 2007 under my same name, with all the account information they need, the branch I use, and I even have a nice young lady from the bank to have her phone number and business card and signature proving that. In order to provide such evidence on company letterhead and obtain those records since Bank of America only keeps records from the past year at their current bank, I had to pay an extra $30 fee to obtain this record, which is not on their approved list.
I also got my traffic ticket from 2010 which proves my driver’s license has been the same since before then to stamp that, and my other traffic ticket from 2012, officially declaring that these tickets are from the orange county courthouse and are therefore quite valid. But the one from 2012 is not five years old, so it is not on their approved list.
To meet their arbitrary five documents over five years old minimum, I will have to wait one additional year to obtain a passport, because I have a metric crapton of documents from 2011 and later, since that’s when I began renting from an actual apartment complex, and have lots and lots of other records and IDs which are 4 years old. I also have W-2s from 2011 since I was hired in december of 2010 to my current job. But those things are not on their approved list.
Keep in mind the plane tickets I was told I needed to obtain before starting this process cost hundreds of dollars and aren’t refundable.
I’ve spent $1,200 so far attempting to leave the country I was born in legally, and am a citizen of, and I even have the passport office telling me that there is zero reason why I shouldn’t have been approved for a passport in the first place because someone in their office screwed up, but since my application has been flagged, that cannot be undone now, and I must jump through five arbitrary hoops on their approved list.
I can prove my identity beyond all doubt to the satisfaction of literally every other department and branch of government. I can even get the passport office to admit they screwed up, and that I should never have been denied a passport.
But I sit here before you with no passport, $1,200 in the hole, and I am relying on someone from the state department with no name, no address, and no identity I am allowed to know, to approve my passport based on documents which are not on their approved list. Oh, and to get these documents to them before my flight, I’ve had to send two packages overnight-ed to them at a cost of 100 dollars total.
A person who, according to the very nice young lady on the phone with me in the office in Miami, will likely “flip through” my documents looking for any reason to deny me my passport, and not examine them closely to detect the original error.
Someone they will not and cannot be bothered to tell, that my driver’s license is in perfect order, and meets all of their requirements, minimum or otherwise, and it only appears at first glance that it does not, and if they would just spend an extra five seconds examining the traffic ticket enclosed, will prove that.
Did I mention that the person I am trying to leave the country to go be with is my girlfriend? Not that it matters. But it matters to me.
This isn’t a vacation these people are screwing up. I intend to meet her family in her native country and move there on a semi-permanent basis.
These people are interfering with my life and the love of my life, and it is based on their own mistake, and they can still deny me for arbitrary reasons.
I am not a violent man, but nothing has made more violent thoughts erupt in my brain than dealing with these soulless assholes who cannot simply stamp “Approved” on my passport application after they have admitted that I have met all the legal requirements to get a passport before they flagged it inappropriately.
Why must people ignore their own rules when it benefits me, but follow their rules to the exact letter after they’ve already broken them?
If the State Department doesn’t approve this passport, I will do nothing. I’m not the kind of person to commit a crime so egregious that I, ironically enough, end up with my photograph in the paper and a newspaper article written about me.
But had I committed such a crime already, my passport would have been approved.
I should know, I have a guy who is a convicted felon for selling meth whose passport was approved on the first try for only 170 dollars who works with me every single night at my job.
So, again,
Fuck the passport offices in Florida, and fuck the State Department, for not doing your jobs, and not being human beings when you make a mistake.
