Filed under: American | Tags: American, Boston, bus, Canada, international, National Passport Office, obstacles, passport, travel
I’m sitting outside the Tip O’ Neil Federal Building in Boston. I’ve got another hour before I can get in line to pick up my passport, which is the reason I’ve come here. Not just to this building but to Boston. I feel very sure that there is someone from Boston sitting outside the New York passport office at this exact moment. They can’t believe they had to travel all the way to New York to renew their passport while I’m still shocked I had to travel all the way to Boston.
American government systems can get a little bit silly sometimes and the passport system is especially silly right now. I’m sure there’s some dumb software issue that explains why a person from Boston is compelled to get their passport in New York and I’m compelled to get mine in Boston. It is clearly more efficient (or at least habitual) for the passport office to do it this way – even if it is very silly.
Because I’ve called the National Passport Office every day for the last two weeks, trying to avoid this trip to Boston, I’ve had the opportunity to talk with a lot of people from this office – not about anything, of course – but I’ve exchanged some words. They have been universally nice and relaxed, despite the fact that most people calling are probably super stressed out and anxious, especially after dealing with the infuriating and confusing phone system that mostly hangs up on you, sometimes lets you through only to hang up on you and sometimes puts you on hold for an hour and a half. The actual humans I saw at the Boston office were equally nice and chill and frankly I do not understand how that is possible.
Every other time I’ve had to engage with a system this big, the people in it are frazzled and irritated. I’m so used to being treated suspiciously and defensively in those sorts of situations, I found myself a little baffled by the Passport Office – which is ruthlessly inefficient but somehow pretty nice about it.
And yet –
Hang on a second –
I had to go stand in a line for half an hour to retrieve my passport so I’m continuing these thoughts back home at my local café the next day.
And yet – I couldn’t help thinking how needlessly cruel this system is, how inconvenient for almost everyone, how this explains why so few Americans travel abroad. I’ll take you through my passport renewal process and I think you’ll see why.
So, our passports need to be renewed every ten years and if you haven’t traveled internationally in, say three years, due to maybe a global pandemic, you will have no reminders that your passport is expiring. No one sends you a postcard or email or text that says, “It’s time to do this again!” You can’t put the expiration on your desk calendar (unless you maybe have a decade long calendar? I don’t know.) and the phone you had when you applied last time is not likely to be the one you have now. So if you’re someone like me, you find out your passport is expiring when you pull it out to double check the passport number for some travel plans. I had about a month and a half before expiration when I discovered it. You’d think that would be ample time to do a short bureaucratic task. It would be, for pretty much anything else, but for passport renewal, it is already way too late. To get an expedited mail-in renewal through a company that specializes in these things, I’d have needed ten weeks lead time, at minimum. So, I had to wait until my trip was 14 days away to call and make an appointment at a passport center. My travel date was on a Sunday and the Monday was a Federal Holiday so it was twelve days to departure for me by the time I was even allowed to make a phone call. After being hung up on multiple times, all day, I finally got through to a person late Tuesday evening, which is when I learned that the only appointment I could get would be in Boston or Vermont. Again, I live in New York City where there is a passport office, where I renewed my passport ten years ago, with a lot less drama. Anyway – I’d seen the news stories about peoples’ nightmares getting their passports so I didn’t argue too much and just accepted my Boston appointment for the last possible date before my flight. I called and called, hoping someone would cancel in New York in the intervening week and a half but no – I got myself on a bus and took myself to Boston.
Was it a real pain in the ass? Yes! Did it cost $55 for a one way ticket? It did. (($83 for the trip back but more about that later.)
But I’ll go ahead and let you know now that I DID get the passport and it DID work for the first phase of my journey because now I’m writing the next phase of this at a table in Terminal Five at JFK but it was touch and go there for a while. I mean, you know what I DON’T want to do before I take a big international trip? Take a trip. I lost two days to the journey and while I love Boston and would have enjoyed hanging out there, how this trip went down was: I put down my phone from my last attempt to change my appointment location on Thursday morning and then kicked in to gear, buying my bus ticket, checking in with my kind (last minute) hosts for the night and gathering my things so I could be gone for two days. The next day (after a pleasant evening with my hosts) I was kindly given a ride to the subway stop, with plenty of time to spare to get to the hard won passport appointment, but then the train just sat there – for ages – my ample cushion of time rapidly decreased. So I downloaded Lyft and booked myself an expensive ride to the passport office where I made it just in time. I got quickly checked in and while I waited in the long line for picking up my passport that is surely the same every day for them but highly unusual for all of us, I checked the times and prices for buses back to NYC and noted a 4:30 for $68 – more expensive than my trip up but fine, good. Passport in hand, I made my way to the bus station, and when I got there, found that the 4:30 bus was now $83. I bought a ticket and then waited the half hour until I could line up for the bus – and proceeded to stand in that line for 45 minutes when we finally learned the bus was canceled and we were all rebooked on crappier less direct buses. I returned to NYC 35 hours after I left, having lost two days but gained a passport and a nice evening with a lovely family.
The things is, as much as a pain in the ass as this was for me, and as needlessly expensive – I know I was lucky to be able to do it. While it sucked to have to lose two days of my life right before a trip, I could do it. But I couldn’t help think of other people. What if I had kids and needed to suddenly find two days of childcare? Or find bus tickets for more than just me? What if I had a job that wouldn’t give me the time off to do a last minute errand to another city 4 to 5 hours away? What if I’d had jury duty I couldn’t get out of to go get my passport? What if I had a disability that makes travel extra challenging? Oh, wait, I do have a disability that makes this kind of travel challenging! (Luckily the new meds are working well and I managed to get through this without puking.) I know it’s got to be the case that not everyone can make this kind of journey. Someone might be able to scrape together the funds for the passport fees and the expedited fees (anything less than ten weeks away will need to be expedited) but not be able to also cover the travel expense. Here are my expenses. $55 bus to Boston, $7.20 for the subway (including the trip I didn’t take because the train didn’t come) $40 Lyft to appointment, $83 bus back to NYC – plus various meals and snacks. That’s $185.20 not including the food and other expenses. My expedited passport was $190.00. It’s a lot of money just to get out of the country for a little bit. And add in the time cost of all this and you’re running into some serious expense. It’s out of reach for a lot of people. And maybe you’re thinking, “oh come on, just give the process the six months lead up you’d need to renew and it’ll only cost, like $79 ($60 for the passport, $12 for the photos, $7 for the postage). Just make sure you have nowhere to go in that time because you have to surrender your passport for this six month process.” Sure, it would be great if everyone could keep track of this sort of thing. But the bandwidth for people dealing with scarcity is significantly diminished (read Scarcity if you doubt this) so someone without significant money is much more likely to be in a position to need a passport in a hurry.
It starts to feel like a sinister way to keep lower income Americans from leaving the country. And maybe this is smart because maybe if they got more opportunities to travel, they’d see all the places that do a much better job at participating in the global culture, that have better safety nets for its lower income citizens and better healthcare (and transportation and safety and so on). Maybe all these obstacles are part of some cynical plot to keep our citizens locked into the same narrow patterns of behavior. It can sure seem that way but it’s probably just a big bureaucracy, understaffed and underfunded by the government-hating previous administration, just doing what they can…and not worrying about all the people that are left behind.
This piece has taken me so long to write that I am now on a small island on the West Coast of Canada, sitting on a pier, enjoying the spectacular view of the ocean and the mountains and this pier not only features an excellent coffee shop but also public washrooms. Across America, you would be hard pressed to find places to pee that won’t require spending money. America is unconcerned with its citizens basic needs. You realize that when you travel. Maybe that’s why they make it so hard to do.
This post was brought to you by my patrons on Patreon.
They also bring you the podcast version of the blog.
It’s also called Songs for the Struggling Artist
You can find the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
Every podcast features a song at the end. Some of those songs are on Spotify, Apple Music, my website, ReverbNation, Deezer, Bandcamp and Amazon Music.
*
Want to help me travel?
Become my patron on Patreon.
Click HERE to Check out my Patreon Page
Or you can subscribe to my Substack
*
If you liked the blog and would like to give a dollar (or more!) put it in the PayPal digital hat. https://www.paypal.me/strugglingartist
To contribute to getting me to Crete, donate on Kofi – ko-fi.com/emilyrainbowdavis
Leave a Comment so far
Leave a comment
Songs for the Struggling Artist 