About a week ago, I finally put together the paperwork for revising our passports. This is a troublesome process because I decided to do two simple things out of order.
I got my name changed _after_ we got married. See, for our current society that’s how things work normally for women. Get married, change your name.
But when I did it, it caused a cascade of weird paperwork. I have a marriage certificate in my _old_ name, and a change of name certificate. As a result, if we need to prove marriage I need to supply the name change certificate.
So, I send off the packet o’ stuff to the US passport agency. For some strange reason, the government felt North Carolina would be the best place to put this. I sent the following to them:
2 passports, 2 application for name change, 1 notarized copy of the marriage cert, and 1 notarized copy of my name change doc.
Today I received a phone call at 6:00 am for shimmeringjemmy. I explain that she’s asleep and I’m her husband. The woman enquired about her passport and ask me if there was any documentation. I ask them what happened to what I sent. She was surprised that the mailroom had “divided up the family” and apparently processed mine with all the documentation and then sent hers along with none to someone else.
She asked if I could re fax the documents. I explained that I was a little fuzzy and all as it was 6 am. I’m guessing that she decided that she wanted to call on this first thing in the morning and opted not to read the word “Washington” on the app. She got the phone number off it, so I know she had the document.
Fortunately, since I’ve been doing this “Fax proof of….” quite a bit, I have most of our ‘vital docs’ scanned and stored in pdf. It takes me about 5 minutes to “Word Up” a fax cover sheet and then Acrobat together the fax and send the fax from the computer. (Gosh, I’ve always wanted to use that song title as a verb)
About 5 minutes later I get a call back that the docs were received and more than acceptable. SJ’s passport will be finished this week and priority mailed back. We should have it by Tuesday. Mine was priority sent Monday I may see it today.
Sadly however, we will not have time to go to Canada or use these passports until at earliest September.
But, it’s moving along 🙂
