I’m exhausted, spent, tired out. I’m mentally drained. I have worked hard. I have labored. I have trained for weeks — studying, planning, prepping. I have given it my all. I need to rest.
Why? I applied for a new passport. Three in fact, and it was no picnic. But I’m done. It is all in the government’s hands now.
There was a time when these sorts of things were a piece of cake. Even fun. The hardest part was stapling the little square photo to the application. Get that right and you were home free. Get it wrong and you forever looked like you had a bullet hole in the center of your forehead.
Today there are greater dangers and more security concerns. Passports are serious business, and they come with many hassles, steps, document needs and all manner of ways it can go wrong.
Take the picture, for instance. There are endless instructions, the most important of which is to not smile. But if you don’t smile, you look serious and mean … kind of like a Russian spy. That’s what my 12-year-old daughter looks like. I’m afraid no country will let her in. “This is Maria Porasgova, the Dark Wolf of St. Petersburg!” some foreign customs agent will declare. “She can kill a man with the flick of her fingernail. ARREST HER!!!”
Even worse, each of our passport situations was different. There was this form and that form. There was unending complexity: locate five pieces of buried Spanish gold or complete an obstacle courses over an alligator pit. We needed birth records, proof of citizenship and photocopies. Photocopies!?! No one has made a photocopy since 1997!
We got to the passport office with a folder thick with everything we rounded up. As we stood in line, I worried we had missed a step. Forgotten a document. Read the instructions wrong. “I’m sorry, you filled out form DS-874, which is for importing illegal chinchillas. You’re not importing illegal chinchillas, are you Mr. Thompson?”
NO! I don’t even know what a chinchilla is!!!
My wife read out loud the sign on the wall: “Good thing we brought the checkbook,” she said. “They only take checks.”
The family in front of us turned around and said, “WHAT?!?”
That was it. They were done. They gave up their space and walked out, glum. “Sorry, no trip to Europe this year, gang.”
I grew more nervous. Sweat ran down my spine and I chewed my fingernails. “Don’t let that be us! Don’t let that be us!”
The passport lady went through everything. Checking this. Signing that. Page after page.
Finally she said: “You’re all set.”
“What?!?” I shouted. “REALLY?!? I didn’t fill out the chinchilla form?”
She looked at me with an odd expression.
“WE DID IT!!!” I told my family … then collapsed in a heap. A woman rushed to me with a sports drink. “Happens all the time,” she said. “Keep him hydrated, and most importantly, don’t let him do any precision-based stapling. And watch out for Maria Porasgova, the Dark Wolf of St. Petersburg!”