Monday, January 8, 2007

Passports for Kids: Part I

No - I don't mean some strange backroom deal where one buys a passport by handing over one's first-born. I mean that while up until now the kids have been on our passports, they're going to need their own if we want to avoid problems at many international borders. I was pretty sure that the Passport Office was going to make me jump through hoops when it comes to getting a passport for Nina.

The main problem is this: Nina is a Schwab - that is to say she was born in Baden-Wuertemberg in Germany (Stuttgart to be precise). Because 'German born, Irish resident 7-year-old daughter of an Irish man and an Italian woman' is not a category that one expects to find in the Passport Office manual, I fully expected this to be a purgatory of unanswered phones and emails, and redirects.

Not so.

Less than two hours after I used an online form to email my enquiry, I got a phone call back explaining exactly what I had to do - and it doesn't involve sacrifical offerings. I'm bloody impressed!

Actually - I just went back to the site to look for the form's url so that I could add it to this post. Looks like their site's fallen over. Got a nice little .Net 1.1 stack trace to admire instead.

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