20
Mar
2010
thou shall not passport
The first day of Smart Geometry is more or less over now, last night’s tutors’ dinner is now just a memory and a crumpled receipt in someone’s pocket.
I’m sat in Oxford, in my house, Winnie-the-Pooh-ing about and putting things in the dishwasher.
This doesn’t seem like very responsible behaviour for a tutor, especially for one of such an exciting cluster as the “Rapid R&D to Rapid Assembly – snap fit, push on….” group. Surely I should be solving wicked problems and grinding out slick moves to make snap fit shuttering carpentry late into the night.
No. If you don’t have a passport – but you do want to travel – then, in a slightly twisted version the words of the great John Nash, “Fuck you buddy“.
This is a complicated problem, and one that rests on an interface problem. The nice people in the passport office struggle with the fax machine.
I think this is going to take a bit of explaining, “no fax machine got to mess up my passport application” you say, and I’m sure it didn’t. So I’ll start form the beginning. last year, when I lived a happier, but more environmentally profligate, life on the other side of the world, I flew a lot. Being an alien, I carried my passport more or less everywhere I went as this was the only way for me to get onto flights if I was flying with certain airlines. One particularly tired night at Canberra airport I must have dropped the passport as I was sitting in departures. This is a sad thing, that passport was looking pretty exciting, it had visas from all sorts of places in it.
So now I didn’t have a passport, and I needed to get back to the UK to do my best manly duties so I ended up getting a temporary passport from the British consulate in Melbourne. This was enough of a drama to warrant its own story, but I’ll leave that for now.
One thing led to another, and pretty soon my six months of temporary [passport] bliss was over, leaving me with a scruffy, thin notebook. That was OK though as I wasn’t going anywhere. Until I got a last minute draft for SG, and it was all go.
Still all OK though, I got the application in with plenty of time to spare, and I was booked on the high luxury of EasyJet U26025 from Brizzol, so what could go wrong.
well, it turns out that it doesn’t take much to bring the process of the mighty Identity and Passport Service to a grinding halt. To issue a passport, an agent needs to confirm that the passport was indeed issued,not forged, so they confirm that with whoever issued the passport. This seems sensible, they’d jump onto a database and check that the person in question exists, 20 seconds with a barcode scan, and away we go.
Hmm, no, this is done by sending a fax to the issuing agency. I don’t know much about faxes, they’d pretty much had their day before I was old enough to buy fags, (and when I was that age, that age was younger than it is now!). What I do know is that they are unpredictable, and there isn’t much you can do to check if they other end is seeing what you put in, or just a food fight in a coal mine.
So the Austrlian end was sent my paperwork on the 23rd of February, and when I first called it had been in their hands for about 20 days. The quoted 3 week target for passport turnaround was already starting to crumble.
The problem with time zones is that everyone goes to work at different times, in the case of Australia and the UK, completely different times. this means that there is just one chance to throw a message over the wall. you send your fax, and then you wait… ..until the next day.
When the next day comes if nothing has happened, then you just do the same thing again.
I’ve spent the last week calling both ends at both ends of the day, hoping that they’d managed to send that fax, but to no avail.
The breakthrough came t 5:30 am today, the fax was found (in the in-tray, filed in the bin, who knows where) and then the rest of the day was battle stations getting the trip organised.
I fly tomorrow afternoon, so fingers crossed that the extra effort of finding the Saturday delivery sticker is worth it.