Adventures in Getting Passported

Since I finally got my certified birth certificate in the mail last week, I finally made it down to the County Clerk's Office to get my no-fee passport taken care of!  It looked like things would go easy and quickly from the moment I walked into the courthouse where the office was located as there was no one other than security guards in sight.  We are, however, talking about Peace Corps business, so easy and quick it was not.

Once I made it though security (now without the cat nail clippers I that I had forgotten which have been swimming at the bottom of my purse), I headed to the blue elevators at the other side of the building and went up to second floor only to discover that the office was right near the elevators and SO easy to find. Yay!  When I walked into the office, there were two ladies sitting behind cubicle set up against the counter and neither of which had anyone to help.  I stepped up and said I needed a no-fee passport and whipped out my UPS envelope sent to me by PC to send my Visa and Passport stuff in via FedEx (so silly) which contained my folder with everything sent to me pertaining to these two items in addition to the newly taken terrible pictures of myself.

That is when the fun started.
Long story short: Another clerk was brought over to help and wound up calling an actual passport agency because they had no clue as to what the protocol was for a PCV's no-fee passport was.  They also tried arguing with me about sending in my sealed application with my visa to SATO despite the fact that the paperwork that I brought in and that they read said to do so! Luckily, they eventually ACTUALLY read the mailing instructions and saw that I was, in fact, to mail it myself.  Oy vey.  I also repeatedly heard the term "walk through" and discovered that I have amazing patience with people.  It is nice to know all of my years in retail have paid off!

Now it all taken care of nice and spiffy and hopefully there will be no more problems with it.

And if anyone was wondering, if you do not have and have never had a regular passport and you want one in addition to your no-fee, you need two certified birth certificates since they get processed separately.  Looks like I may have to embassy it up in Ukraine to get a personal one... Unless this passport place lied to me.  Let's hope not.