I was filling out the family’s passport application forms today (Canadian). These are the so called simplified renewal passport application forms, which paradoxically seem to be harder to understand with respect to what they do and do not require than the standard forms. As I was filling them out, and getting my husband and the guarantor to fill in and sign the appropriate areas, I was getting progressively more irritable and flustered.
This is not unique to passport application forms. I have this same reaction whenever I have to fill out any “important” form. I’m otherwise pretty calm and laid-back so this is a bit odd. Furthermore, I have to fill out forms for patients pretty routinely (e.g. the short-term and long-term disability forms) and even though the form isn’t for me I still get frustrated with the powers who thought up the form - how am I supposed to know when and if this patient will be able to return to work? If I had precognition I would not be a doctor, for pity’s sake, I would have gone into some field where predicting the future accurately would be valuable. I often want to cross out the whole form and write “If they are able to return to work, I’ll let you know. Until then, they aren’t able to work so please pay out their insurance.”
Does anybody else have this sort of reaction to official forms? How do you handle it?
I do. I hate forms. I just filled out my US Passport renewal. Pain in the ass.
Two pictures. OK. Staple here. umm… both pictures? Or does the other one just go loose.
How do I handle it? Calmly and without interruption. I think a lot of it has to do with not wanting to screw it up. Not wanting the thing to come back because I did not put my middle name on line 12 block 4.
I feel for you, having done the Canadian Passport thing a few times myself. And once, because I qualified, I toyed with getting a British Passport. Holy Hannah, the British form is like 100 times worse. I mean, think about it, go back a couple of generations and an enormous number, of now foreign lands, were filled with qualified British Subjects. So, “if you were born here, on or before such and such a date, born here, between this date and this,…” and so on and so on, endlessly. Whew boy, I never complained about the Canadian form again!
The US passport renewal is a piece of cake compared to the Canadian. I did mine abot four years ago and my wife did it last year. Completely trivial. The Canadian form is a real pain in the ass. I’ve never done it (for one thing it is valid for only five years) and requires you find a “notable” (doctor, lawyer, University professor, maybe clergyman–I don’t know any of them) to guarantee your identity. All this was put in effect because James Earl Ray had a fake Canadian passport and the US objected that Canadian passports were too easy to get. As easy as US passports, I imagine but the Canadian ones are still a pain and the US still easy.
I don’t find filling forms and surveys irritating per se; I know that they can be a very useful tool. But many of them are horribly misdesigned. Some recent examples:
Why are you only giving me five languages to choose my mother tongue from? There are thousands of languages in the world and my first language is not any of those five! And it’s not like Spanish is a teeny weeny language only a few linguists can read
A question on the responder’s influence in hiring decisions which did not have an option for “I’m not involved in hiring”.
Mixing questions which only make sense for clients of the company posting the survey and others which only make sense for potential workers of the same company.
I am form phobic, I hate filling them in as I tend to find them tedious and repetitive.
It’s not about the writing, I write a lot at work but something about forms just fills me with dread. If possible I try to get my wife to do the form filling as she has more tollerance for these thigns than I do.
Ugh, hate forms and paperwork too, but most of all I hate signing stuff. For my visa and work permit I have sign form after form after form… every 6 months or so. Seriously, the HR woman comes over with 30 or so photocopied pages and off I go with the signing. Thank goodness I don’t have to fill the forms myself.
And if hating doing paperwork like this wouldn’t be enough, my country doesn’t have an embassy in Thailand, so if I need, for example, a new passport I have to fly to Kuala Lumpur. I mean, it’s annoying enough to do paperworks and fill forms with all the “Now have this stamped at desk 14”, but if in between getting and filling a form and having it stamped one needs to take a frickin’ international flight it’s an epic drag.
Weird. I thought the simplified passport renewal was rather straightforward and easy. Name, address and contact info, recent job history, names and contacts of two people who know you, pop into a pharmacy for photos and hand it in at the passport office (or mail it in, but I was in a bit more of a hurry). Done - got it in the mail 6 days later. How much simpler could it possibly be? Are you sure you’re filling out the renewal form and not the new passport application?!
I remember filling out the passport papers initially. They gave us the papers and a pen. Problem was there was no place around to fill it out. So here we are in the middle of the courthouse sitting on some steps awkwardly trying to write on a flat surface. Trying to remember where my dad was born all the while trying to avoid getting stepped on by passing traffic.
ETA: Then over the weekend we remembered we had a trip to Canada planned the following week and we had just sent off my mother’s birth certificate. :eek: Luckily we actually found her original back in the bottom of some box.
If you’re starting from scratch, I’ll ask: Do you have a qualified guarantor? I’m sure you do, but if not, I’ve certainly known you from Calgary Doper gatherings for the required number of years, and would be happy to sign for you. Let me know.
No, there was a reason for it: professional disciplinary bodies. If I do something in my capacity as a lawyer, and screw it up, I may be faced with professional discipline, even if the screw-up doesn’t amount to an offence under the relevant federal law relating to passports. That provided an additional incentive to the person vouching for the applicant to get the facts right.
Go to a police ID office with two pictures and government-issued ID (either your national ID, your driver’s license or the previous passport), wait in line, either fill in a change-of-address form or verify that the one in the old documents is correct, get thumbed, wait for the passport to come off the printer.
You used to have to wait a week or two for it to be signed by the Provincial Governor, but not any more.
I dislike the forms where every character has to fit into a little box. For years I lived in a town whose name had more characters than the little boxes would allow. I finally moved – my new address is 14 REALLYLONGSTREETNAMETHATDOESNTFITEITHER.