Passport awesomeness

I feel as though I'm in a pre training process of what is to come. I've had a horrible stomach bug for the past two days of which the source I cannot say and I had some fun with bureaucratic red tape yesterday!

So I'm traveling outside of the country in between now and staging which means that I have to fill out a DS-11 form which is essentially applying for a new passport. It took me a couple weeks to even make it to the passport office and so I'm already nervous about the passport getting on time. Then I get to the passport office, inform her that I need her to fill out a couple of things and witness my signature to which she replies "you need an appointment for that". Okay, great, how do I schedule one? She then informs me the next available appt is July 12th. What!? Definitely gonna miss the deadline if I wait until then plus I'm going to be in Canada.

So I notice that a clerk of court can also witness my signature. I ask the Post Office, where I can find a clerk of court and they say hmm you need a notary, just go to the law offices next door. A little skeptical of the notary thing because I feel like if I just needed any bank or something to notarize the passport signature it would have said that in the instructions. But in the interest of time and only having so much time during a lunch break, I go next door. I then tell her the clerk of court deal to which she says yea I notary. Fine, whatever you say. So I sign, she notarizes and then says, wait...I think this is wrong. You need a passport agent to do this.

So back to the Passport agent. Anyway point of the story is that it's very back and forth. Finally convinced her that I am in fact not trying to magically have two passports at once, that one is for government travel and the other for personal use, to which she obliges and signs everything. I had to fill out another passport app by hand which I'm hoping is okay and I didn't screw anything up.

Keepin my fingers crossed! Anyway, I feel like this was a reminder...hey things don't go as planned, but just try to have a good laugh about it at the end of the day.

Sooo for those of you who have questions about getting your passport...feel free to ask me because I have now become an expert!