The "Beating the Deadline, and not Knowing It" Story

It was an ordinary day. Carol and I had just come home from renewing our passports. When you get a passport it is supposed to be good for 11 years. Well our passports are good until April 18 of 2011, but it seems that it must be good for 6 months after you return from your last trip abroad. Not what sense does that make. Why don't they say the passport is good for 10 years and 6 months. Well, we plan to head on a cruise through the Panama Canal in late fall and if we have any trouble, we may get home a day or two after the 18th of October which would mean that we have gone past the 6 months limit. Make any sense to you? So we did some research and decided to renew right now before it gets too late. Takes 4 to 6 weeks to get your new passport after you apply and we're getting too close to our date we leave to wait any longer. Tried to do it online, but you still have to mail in a photo and your old passport, so we went to the library in Ephrata, PA where they handle passport applications. Got there at 4:45 PM and it was packed. We signed our name on the list and there must have been close to 20 people in front of us. We found the application and sat down to fill it out. General questions such as where were you born, your address and do you have any other names besides the one you put on the top line of the form. If you did you had to list them. They gave you space for about a dozen alias' under the question. If you couldn't fit them on the lines provided you had to turn the form over and place them on the back. Unbelievable! I was going to have fun with this one, but Carol told me to "knock it off." Then I had to put my height and hair color. Now I have a problem. I looked at Carol and said, "What do I put for hair color?" We went back and forth and finally I put brown on the line. Then the line for eye color. "What do I put for this one?" I asked. "Just put blue," she said even though I have one blue eye and one half blue and half red. Wouldn't they have looked if I had put that! We waited until someone came to help us and then had to get new photos taken. They make funny faces at you so you look stupid for the photo, then push the button at the worst moment. After this the girl sat with us and checked to make sure we had all the lines filled in correctly. She did Carol's first and stopped for a second and looked her in the eye. "What's the matter?" Carol said to her. "Just looking at your eyes to make sure they are green in color," she said. Everything OK with Carol's form. Now it was my turn. "Why did you put brown on the hair color line when you have NO hair?" she asked. "Because bald isn't a choice," I said. "And, my eyebrows are brown." "No they're not," she said. "They're white. Oh, just forget it. We'll leave brown on the line. Everything else was fine and we passed our passport test. For a fee they will take care of mailing them for us so I wrote 2 checks for $75 which is the passport fee and one check for $30 which is for the photos she took and the mailing. $180 so we can fly out of the country. Then I asked, "Is it always this busy in here?" "Not usually. Passports go up in price next week to $110 and everyone is trying to beat the deadline," she said. Wow, we didn't realize that, but at least we beat the deadline. Now we have to hope we get our passports in time to be able to use them. It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy. PS - My old and new photos. When the agents would look at my old passport and see the blue hairnet on the top of my head, they always laughed. And then they laugh again when they look at the glasses. Carol didn't want her photos displayed, since they look REALLY BAD!