You know, we all hear so many complaints about the many ways that the government is dysfunctional, I think when it works well, we should shout it loud and often. Today, I want to praise the U. S. State Department for the way they handled our passport renewals.
About 2 1/2 weeks ago Carolyn and I sent in our applications for new passports. I remarked at the time that although we had paper application forms, the State Department had created an online form that could be completed online then printed out. They probably could have made it so that it could be submitted online but we had to send in our old passports and our pictures anyway. At the time they were estimating that it would take 3 weeks to get our new passports.
Yesterday, we received our new passports 5 days earlier than the 3 weeks promised! At this speed it would make no sense to order expedited processing.
The only "rough spot" we encountered was the tracking system. Like UPS or FedEx, the State Department supposedly has a system where you can check online where in the process your passport application is. We could never get a response that our applications were in the system at all let alone where in the system they were. Because we had sent a check, we knew when the check was cashed that we were somewhere in the system. This problem, of course, was minor for us because the applications were processed so fast.
So a great big tip of the hat and 3 cheers for the U. S. State Department's handling of passport renewals.
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