the case of the expiring passport

I promised you this tale of woe, so here it goes. Spoiler alert: although it is a tale with some truly hair-raising moments, it ends happily, and in a future post, you'll get to read about the fruitful uses to which I put my new U.S. passport.

All through the first half of 2007, I'd been planning and looking forward to a trip to France. The primary reason for this visit was work-related, as I was invited to participate in an academic roundtable tantalizingly titled "Queer Taxonomies," and it was an opportunity for me to get working on a piece I'm writing about sapphic-minded ladies and their maids in 1720s British literature. I won't bore you with further details on that topic. Let's just say it's turning out to involve a discussion of "Welsh flummery."

I guess planning is too strong a word to use for the way in which I was preparing for this trip, as I waited until nearly a month before the conference to arrange for my flight (mindblowingly expensive), pay my conference fees (ditto), and secure my lodging (refreshingly economical). You see, John and I were originally going to go together, spend a week in Montpellier, where the conference was being held, and another week in Paris, eating and drinking as much as possible. Well, the flights to Paris were prohibitively expensive, and because only I was getting University funding for the trip, we made the difficult decision that I would go it alone. We would look forward to a trip to Paris--sans academic commitments--sometime next year. Besides, John's passport had expired, and it was going to take him anywhere from six weeks to three months to have it renewed.

I, on the other hand, was resting on a bed of assurance, knowing that my travel dates were from early- to mid-July, and that my passport wouldn't expire until August. This was until my friend Shane alerted me to the possibility that an airline might not allow me to board unless I had at least a good six months before my passport expired. He'd heard about people being turned away at airports for this reason.

Thinking I'd better check this out, I went to the local passport information office and inquired. And, yup, turns out Shane was right. I even drove over to the American Airlines counter at Fresno Yosemite International (FYI!--or as airport-naming powers that be insist upon, Fresno Airline Terminal, or FAT) to verify this alarming bit of news. The woman at the counter confirmed it. I wanted to rant about the meaning of the word expire, and how if the expiration date was good enough for the U.S. government, it should be good enough for American Airlines. But I refrained.

Now, why this information isn't more widely known--printed on the flight itineraries that the airlines themselves generate, for example--I don't know. But in the increasingly disappointing realm of airline effectiveness, this seemingly important detail can go uncommunicated to would-be passengers who have drawn perfectly reasonable conclusions about the validity of their passports. At this point, I invite you to go check the state of your passport. I'll be here when you come back. If you now find yourself clutching your soon-to-be useless passport in one hand and locks of perfectly good hair in the other, bouncing from foot to foot and screaming to the high heavens, "now how am I going to get to Tehran???"--then take some deep breaths. What I have to tell you may be heartening.

The stern but not unyielding woman at Fresno's downtown branch of the U.S. Post Office gave me some hopeful advice, almost all of which turned out to be bogus. She gave me a 1-800 number that I should call to make an appointment to visit the closest passport agency in San Francisco. She told me to get a date--any date--and then head over to San Francisco and, in the we hours of the morning, wait in long lines in the hopes that the armed guards barring the agency entrance might relent and let those without appointments for that day enter the building and then wait in more lines.

You think you've experienced automated telephone service hell, but, trust me, unless you've grappled with this one, you have not. The first hurdle is getting beyond the "we're sorry, call volume is through the roof right now. Try calling back at, say, 4 a.m." And even if you do set your alarm and wake up at 4 a.m. and call that damn number over and over and over, you may not get to the next stages, where, until you've become familiar with the system's idiosyncrasies, you will learn that "I'm sorry. There are no more appointments available." I found that the trick is never to request an afternoon appointment. This inevitably leads to the "none available" answer, followed by a click and a dial tone and your screams of horror at the sound of such ominous noises. I found I had to stick with morning appointments--God knows why--which I did, and, finally, I was successful in securing an appointment date, time, and confirmation code.

The problem was that my appointment was for a mere few days before I was to leave the country, and I wanted to get some sleep between now and then. So, I planned a very sudden trip to San Francisco and left on a Wednesday, planning to stay until Friday, just in case I needed two full days to stand in line at the agency. I'm lucky to have even found a hotel room at all, given that SF's Gay Pride (scroll down, way down) events were coming up that weekend, and I hadn't factored these into my plans.

Well, to make a long story short (I know, too late), after a fitful night in what appeared to be a child's single bed, amid truly terrible decor involving geese in bonnets, I ended up arriving at the U.S. Passport agency in San Francisco bright and early on a Thursday morning, necessary documents in my hot little hand.

What I learned there was that you didn't really need an appointment, after all. Sure those good little citizens who had dutifully gone through 1-800-GOV-HELL to secure an appointment were admitted in first. But in the end, everyone in that line got in. Once inside, I enjoyed some pretty friendly and relatively prompt service. The only hitch was that I had arrived two weeks and one day prior to my departure date, and the folks at the agency are only supposed to help walk-ins who show up within two weeks of their departure date. Luckily, the woman behind the bullet-proof glass barrier pitied me when I began to panic and shriek, "but I drove all the way across the California desert to do this and I'm staying in a geese-filled, South-of-Market hotel room!" She nodded with understanding: "well, in that case..."

So I turned in my forms, paid my exorbitant expediting fees, and came back that afternoon to pick up my new passport. Inside were a rotten photo of me and my many chins and a few too many images of bald eagles for my taste. Still, it was a valid passport! It was going to get me where I needed to go!

Afterward, I walked into the nearest brew pub, downed some tasty IPAs, and had a lovely salad with flavorful cheeses and candied walnuts, all the while gazing at attractive, tattooed and shaven-headed men, who were watching some sports event on the TV. (Ah, San Francisco.)

If there is any wisdom to be gleaned from this story, it's this: screw the rules, and just show up! Life is too short to spend it pacing around the house on your cordless shouting "yes" and "no" at an automated voice recognition telephone system at four in the morning. And, hey! It's San Francisco, so how bad can it be?