MegaSack DRAW - This year's winner is user - rgwb
We will be in touch
Just recieved a letter saying that we hadn't enclosed our Daughters Birth Certificate with her passport application. ABSOLUTE BOBBINS, you lieing ****IN Ijits!! Supposed to be heading off to a month of relaxing in the sun of Europe and because of your friggin incompetence now we can't. A once in a lifetime opportunity RUINED due to ****in unionised ****wits who cant do there job properly. STRIKE! Get back to work or be privatised! ARRRGGGGHHHH.
Probably should have put the birth certificate in with the application.
Same day appointment with a replacement birth certificate.
For baby passport you can't use the one day service. Can take upto 3 weeks to get an appointment for the fast track, but can't book appointment with a pending application and would take 3 weeks to cancell the existing application (in writing), so minimum of 6 weeks for 'fast track'. And off course the birth certificate was sent with the application!!
Passport office and DVLA are scum. I'm anti privatisation but these two should be privatised ASAP. Useless and not fit for purpose.
oops
That's why the prices went up so much a few years ago.
Also see the cost of recovery of British folks from various war zones and drug busts round the world.
A once in a lifetime opportunity RUINED due to **** unionised ****wits who cant do there job properly.
Or ruined by your inability to heed their long-standing advice not to make travel arrangements until you have your documents. Just a thought....
when did you apply OP?
It has been on the news for the last few months that they have had problems for a while in processing applications. They did say they need at least 8 weeks, possibly more to turn a passport around from application to receiving.
Why would you not send the birth certificate as they clearly ask for it. If I remember rightly it's even written on the outside of the envelope.
Should have used the post office check and send, they check its all there send it securely to passport office, and then deliver it back a week latter and leave it in a communal letter box for a few hours, when you where in all day and he couldnt be bothered ringing the intercom.
For future reference, and assuming you didn't know, The Post Office do a check and send service which i've always used in the past. Doesn't cost alot so well worth it.
The think the PO check and send is a rip off. Over £9 to read 3 sheets of paper and check some documents are included.
The OP filled the documents in correctly. The Passport office has lost them.
Sent our application off for a baby passport 6 weeks ago and it's arrived today in the post. Hopefully it is our daughters when I get back and open it later.
Give them a ring, if you genuinely did send the birth certificate it may well be found or they might come to an accommodation?
or
Just send her ahead in the post.
FTFYWhy would you not [s]send the birth certificate as they clearly ask for it. If I remember rightly it's even written on the outside of the envelope[/s] read the whole thread?
To be honest after 14 replies I'm disappointed to not have been given a rant score.
Am considering just burying her under a pile of coats on the way out, and then getting the passport sent out to us somewhere in France.
(Not actually booked anything, but due to combination of Maternity/Paternity and annual leave this is a fairly unique chance to have some quality time as a family, so pretty annoyed if we can't head over the channel)
Borrow someone elses, all babies are quite ugly and look the same.
It's nothing to do with unions or strikes, the passport office is a badly run, underresourced disaster area, standard MO for the home office.
The think the PO check and send is a rip off. Over £9 to read 3 sheets of paper and check some documents are included.
And yet, it'd have been £9 for the OP to avoid being in the situation they're in. Small price to pay, in this case not necessarily for the documents to be checked but for the subsequent redress to prove who'd made the mistake.
It is a crazy situation though, and I do sympathise. We ended up having to reschedule a recent holiday due to "oops, I can't find my passport" shenanigans, fun times.
I think you may find that the mail opening part of most of the Civil Service has already been privatised by Capita so maybe direct your understandable ire at the private sector......
And yet, it'd have been £9 for the OP to avoid being in the situation they're in
No it wouldn't.
Small price to pay, in this case not necessarily for the documents to be checked but for the subsequent redress to prove who'd made the mistake.
Proving who made the mistake doesn't solve the issue and get the OP a passport in the time frame required. I'd hope that they'll still want to see a birth certificate and they don't just go oh, OK then here's a passport anyway.
Are you flying of travelling on a ferry? A friend of mine travelled on the ferry last year with no passport for his 4 year old daughter, he just phoned ahead (the ferry operator and French customs )and asked if it would be a problem. It wasn't.
OP
3 out of 10. OK use of capitalisation. No spelling mistakes. And makes sense. Could try harder.
Feel better now Princess? 😉
I recently needed a baby one within 4 weeks, applied as usual at the post office who told me it should be 3 weeks. in the 4th week i called and requested the 'free upgrade' to premium or express status but this is meaningless.
i ultimately had to contact my MP whos secretarry seems to do this sort of thing daily and within 3 days we had the passport.
so you have time, dont bother attempting to contact them through their own telephone number you wont get any meaningful information , your MP or more accurately their staff, can put pressure on. Well , it worked for me.
so you have time, dont bother attempting to contact them through their own telephone number you wont get any meaningful informatio
untrue in my experience. I stupidly put mine through the wash. Had a week in the alps booked for 4 weeks time. Phoned them on a few occasions as things were getting very close. They took it out of the normal queue and upgraded it for free. Passport arrived 3 days later
Are you flying
wrap the baby up well and stick it in the hold?
3 out of 10. OK use of capitalisation. No spelling mistakes.
I disagree, we've got "Ijits", there's an incorrect "there" in there, missing apostrophe on "daughters". I thought it was one of the better efforts 8/10.
Can't help with your plight though OP.
The Passport Office are struggling with a massive recruitment problem - not enough staff, poor publicity due to delays, no one applying for the jobs.
When I get back to the trenches tomorrow I will delete a lot of Civil Service Jobsite emails all with Passport vacancies in them. The grass is in no way greener over there!
Has the OP tried calling them? In the past when I've dealt with lost paperwork it has usually been found as once you've told them they should have it.
8.5/10 Good mix of capitalisation, swearing and coherent / incoherency slowing building up in tension and anger. One obvious spelling / colloquialism - I would have scored you higher if there were a few more spelling mistakes and / or if the rant was a little longer. Good work.
In the interests of balance I called the passport office last Tuesday (answered almost immediately) to ask for a Fast Track appointment. Got an appointment on the Friday morning. Passport plopped through the letterbox yesterday.
Check and send is for the hard-of-thinking.
Slipping standards in RANTS on STW. [\Shakes head and wanders off mumbling about how things used to be] 🙄
Getting from England to France won't be a problem if by car. I had an issue a while back when, the night before travelling, I realised my then-13 yr old duaghters passport had expired 3 months previously.
After a few panicked phone calls I decided to chance it - and sailed through on the way out, just waved a handful of passports at French customs.
Got a minor telling off on the way back though!
My advice - if you are dead set on going - phone the PP office, get things moving, go anyway, get someone to post the new PP on to you in France, and just stay there until it arrives!
Just take some folder red card to wave on the way out, they'll never notice 😀
Bureaucrats are not easy to deal with so you need to be absolutely sure everything is in place before even considering approaching them. They are a nightmare to deal with. Read the small print very carefully ...
Passport Office are utter, utter tossers and shouldn't be allowed to process a barbecue invite, let alone anything important.
Too long a story to be bothered typing the whole sorry thing.
I despise them and their stupid systems - they are a shining example of some of the (many) things I hate about this country.
Sorry to hear about your problem OP 🙁
I'd be very wary of relying on the Post Office passport check TBH. When I applied for a replacement passport (I lost the old one) she looked through everything and said all was fine. Fastforward about 6 weeks and got everything posted back [i]"sorry schnor, we can't accept your application as your counter-signer didn't sign the back of the photo correctly"[/i].
Ok, fair enough he didn't, but that's the whole point of doing the PO check ffs. I went down to the PO and asked for my money back - and to complain - only to be told by the manager [i]"oh no, we don't actually check the content we just make sure that you've included all the relevant things on this checklist"[/i].
Basically you pay them £9 to check you've got the form, two photos and I think something else. Don't do what I did and assume they'll check your forms are actually filled in correctly. He just didn't see what my problem was 😐 got my £9 back though the useless ****
My passport renewal has taken months, I've given up hope of ever seeing it again. So I'm stuck in a forren country. Drat 😆
So hang on, you're jetting off on a summer holiday with your newborn, whiles some poor sod is covering your shifts because you're on paternity leave. And when you get back to work I bet you'll both want to take you actual holiday entitlement, maybe for a trip to lapland? Or not work Xmas because it's babies first? Don't remember the last time I had a holiday...Never got paternity leave in my day.... Grumble,moan,boa,grumble...
Ha ha! I love threads like this. 😆 Idiot fails to sort somethng out well in time for a rip, so it's someone elses'fault!
Passport office and DVLA are scum. I'm anti privatisation but these two should be privatised ASAP. Useless and not fit for purpose.
They gave my wife an appointment for 8.45am the next day, following her call around 5pm, and she had her passport at just after mid-day. In spite of the apparent backlog crisis. ****ing stars in our bok.
I've used the Passport Office at Victoria for a 4hr turnround in the past. All worked fine, is that not an option?
I sincerely doubt that the staff at the passport office were deliberately trying to cock things up for the OP, cock-ups do however happen (in my world anyway)
On the bright side, you get to holiday in the UK now which is lovely.
As for the "privatise it all" comments, it would only end up with Serco, Capita or Atos and when one of those showers get their mitts on the passport office, we might as well all holiday in the UK...
I can't help but feel some of these departments/offices are 'trailing a leg' after the austerity cuts to provoke an apparent crisis due to 'under-staffing' thereby getting media exposure for their agenda.
Public sector approach to cutbacks: do nothing, don't try to streamline anything, wait for shit to hit fan, go on strike.
Private sector approach to cutbacks: do anything possible to make up the gap by working smarter, partially succeed, but have to work harder, get given yet more work as a result, eventually lose rag and leave.
I'm not saying one way is better than the other, but I know that come 50-55 years of age I'm going to be looking for a public sector job to coast into retirement from......
For those questioning the OP's organisation I'd ask is this for the newborn and how long ago was it born? There's only so much paternity time you get and if it's within that this will have been necessarily rushed. They do after all need a photo of the baby and they won't accept the grainy brown and white ones you get with a scan.* 🙂
* Thought it'd be about as much use - all babies look the ***ing same anyway.
£9 for the check and send seems good value to me. Considering you pay, so your application is not held upon its arrival for your payment to clear, its sender via expedited mail and gets right into the processing department next day for processing, and is expedited back to you via recorded delivery, not to mention the inconvenience saved if you do make an inadvertent mistake. Last time I did it despite having a photo taken at a 'proper' passport photo place, they advised the photo was not great and there is a risk it would be rejected, so I got another done just to be on the safe side and it was on its way later that afternoon. At that time the stated processing time was at least 2 weeks - I had my passport back inside of 10 days. Storming service in my opinion.
If I were to document the tale of incompetence surrounding the securing of renewals for our 3 children most of you wont have enough years left to read it and I certainly haven't time to write it.
Having two birth certificates in two languages, and a registration of birth document with an incorrect date, I just am resigned to an interview each time I renew....
Some years ago I went travelling to Central America. Two days before flying, I put a last load of clothes in the washer, stuff I needed for the trip. Then I headed off to work. Mid-morning I suddenly realised, completely out of the blue, that my passport was in the pocket of one of the pairs of trousers in the wash...
I told my boss I had an emergency and legged it home. The passport was all blurry and not stuck together very well, it looked like a very bad forgery. We were due to fly via the states, and this was just after 9/11 so they were very hot on security at the time.
I rang the passport office in Victoria and asked about getting a replacement. They said it would take four weeks to get a replacement. There was a 24-hour option, at a cost, but that was only an option if some of my personal details on the passport had changed. Which they hadn't.
Except, I'd got my old passport when I was about 14, and it was probably the first thing I'd ever had to sign, so I hadn't really settled on a signature at that time. By the time I was 22 or so my signature was slightly different, and instantly became even more different... luckily that was enough to justify using the 24-hour service!
Still seems bizarre to me that you could get a passport in 24 hours if there was incorrect information, but it would take four weeks if it was damaged (i.e. just a straight replacement, not having to verify new information).