General Discussion

I got my first one at age 16, so I have only had renewals.

I can understand the thoroughness these days. With people researching obscure stuff about ourselves that we might not even know, identity theft has become an issue where forty years ago, we didn’t even have an expression for it. Now, it’s not an unrealistic scenario to apply for a passport, and then get a visit from the FBI accusing you of identity theft, because someone else beat you to it, and is now walking around with what should be your passport. No one would ever know unless the real you applied.

With my first granddaughter, it was really crazy. My daughter had to prove that she had lived in the USA for seven years even though she had been an American citizen from birth, and she had to get original transcripts from schools she attended. No copies. This meant bugging schools in Hawai’i, Washington, DC and New York. What took me two hours at the American Embassy in Germany in 1985 for her birth certificate and first passport, took my daughter eleven months in 2018. She got it done, but what a performance!

And don’t even ask about the hoops I had to jump through in order to get my (still current!) passport renewed in 2020, the first year of Covid-19. From Boston to Dallas to Washington to Frankfurt (Frankfurt finally got it done—the 12 month backlog that Washington had claimed turned out to be ten days).