ferrousland.com - daily news archives
Thursday, October 20, 2005
passport rigmarole - 04:28 PM
(filed under 'general')
i've finally been able to submit smiley's passport application, but my goodness me! what a rigmarole it was to get it happening!
this is going to be one of my long, drawn out stories, so read on if you want the long version. 
i had to get smiley's application & passport photos signed by someone who's known him for twelve months or longer, but we've only been in emerald for eight months, so there's no one here who's known him that long. so after getting the photo done & filling in everything on the form which i was able to, i sent it off to mum to get her boyfriend, bill, to be the guarantor since it has to be someone who's not related by birth or marriage.
i popped in the four photos, all still together as one piece of paper, & sent it off via express post & in the meantime looked even harder for smiley's birth certificate which, two moves since he was born, had been either misplaced or put in the dreaded bottomless pit of the "safe place where i won't lose it". what a worry. we looked so hard for that thing & it caused us much stress to not be able to find it.
mum called me after it arrived at her place & was ready to send back. i double checked about the signing of the photo & mum said, "yes," bill had done that, too. i asked if she'd cut & trimmed the pictures first, since there was quite a large 'gutter' of white around each one & i wanted to make sure his signature etc wasn't going to be spread across more than one picture. no, she hadn't cut them, but she assured me he had signed in the right place.
the form arrived back. bill had filled in the bits he'd needed to & had written on & signed the back of the pictures in the manner prescribed. i did note, however, that it had been signed right over in one corner, past the edge of the picture & onto the gutter. when i sent it off, i'd thought to myself, "perhaps i should cut & trim the photos first," but i thought, "no, they're intelligent people. they know how to sign the back of a photograph." i should have listened to the voice in my head.
at that stage, we still hadn't found smiley's birth certificate, so after looking in the final few boxes & still not finding it, i began the process of obtaining a copy. this part proved to be the least troublesome of the lot. i chose the express service, since we were fast running out of time to get his application processed before we'd be leaving the country.
his birth certificate arrived in this morning's mail, so i double checked the part in the application where it told me, as smiley's parent/guardian, what i had to bring along in the way of identification to prove that i was who i said i was: something with signature & a photo. drivers license. that'll do.
i drove to the post office, but when i finally got to the head of the line, the woman looked & said that i needed my birth certificate to prove i was born in australia. i didn't see that bit, because it was written in a separate area than where it told me what other stuff i had to bring. how annoying .. & confusing.
this was going to be a test, since in our box travels, i was sure i'd come across my birth certificate, but now i wasn't so certain as to where it had been put in preparation for moving. amazingly enough, when i drove home & dashed inside with the engine still running, i found it right away! i went back to the car & drove back to the post office.
back at the post office again. wait in line again. finally got to see someone again. the lady took the form & started to check that everything was filled in correctly. there was one bit that was wrong. it had asked for smiley's 'town or city' of birth. i'd put 'brisbane' since that's the town or the city in which he was born. his birth certificate states it as 'auchenflower' since that's the suburb where the hospital is located. it was easy enough to fix, thankfully, & she used some of that correction tape stuff to white it out & write 'auchenflower' over the top. talk about frustating. if they'd wanted it as written on the birth certificate they should have been more specific & said, 'suburb'!
then we had to deal with my name being changed. you see, when shroom & i got married, i wanted to take his name but i didn't want to drop my own name. i'm not a big fan of hyphenated names, so i decided have his last name as my usual last name, but to keep my family name as one of my given or middle names. the only way i could do this on my drivers license was to change my name by deed poll. so today when i grabbed my birth certificate, i took my change of name certificate with me. she wondered if i would have to have my marriage certificate as well & had to call over a senior person to check. after already having gone home, i begged her,"please, please tell me i don't have to go home to get my marriage certificate!" fortunately, it was okay.
there were other issues though. the picture. you have to stick two pictures inside the application. one face up & one face down, the face down one with the declaration & signature of the guarantor on the back. the one that was face up i'd trimmed to the right size, but the face down one with the writing on the back, i had to leave a bit larger because the writing was right up to the edge of the photo paper in the gutter of the picture. she'd already cut halfway along one side to trim it to size before i told her to stop & pointed out that it would cut off the writing on the back. another thing which she then had to check on with the supervisor.
this wasn't going very well. i was thinking the whole time that if i couldn't get it in today &, even worse, if i had to send another picture to brisbane to get signed, that we might not be able to get his passport back in time for the flights which had been booked. i also chose the express option which means we should get it within a week, just before we leave emerald, as opposed to the normal way which can take several weeks.
in the end, everything was fine, but far out .. what a lot of stress! add to that the fact that smiley was getting just a tad bored & was trying to jump about on the counter, wanting to play with the the stapler & the rubber stamps, actually playing with the rubber stamps then missing the paper & getting the counter all inked up, putting his fingers on the rubber stamps & getting his fingers all inked up, etc, etc. on top of all that they had these annoying stuffed toys on the counter which played christmas music really loudly & some kid kept making it play. it was so loud that the lady who was serving me & i had to raise our voices to make ourselves heard!
man, oh man. i'm so glad that's out of the way. it's out of my hands now. i'll be so glad when it arrives in the mail & i can hold his actual passport in my hands.
mind you, it wasn't over when i got home. i'd asked shroom to bring my passport home after he'd taken them to work to scan them for his new employers. he thought he'd already given it to me. uh .. no. after a morning like the one i'd had, i really didn't want to think about then having to get my own passport re-issued. i only had to be pissed off for about an hour though, as once we'd estabished it definitely wasn't on shroom's desk or my desk, he went into work & found it still inside the scanner. we both breathed a big sigh of relief.
far out. what a day. tell you what, the tiredness from lack of sleep (the earliest we've been able to get to sleep in the last two & a half weeks is 12:30am, with every other night being at 1:30am simply because our brains won't settle down) & from being so busy doing everything we have to do is really getting to me. going to bahrain is exciting, but at this stage i'm looking forward to getting there just so that we can get some rest! rotfl!!! 
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