W
e drove down to Boston today to get Elena's passport renewed, during a single-day event for Guatemalans. The only available time slot was at 8am, and it's a 3 hour drive, so we were up pretty early. What was supposed to be an hour-long meeting to fill out paperwork and take a photo ended up taking more than six hours, not counting the six hour round trip. Elena was inside the city hall by herself, while I did my best to keep John entertained in the bizarrely Hispanic streets of Chelsea, Massachusettes. The team from the Guatemalan embassy just could not get any part of their system to work, and we ended up thanking our lucky stars we were in the 8am group, because four hours after the start, they had not yet gotten to the 9am slot of onlookers. We were all pretty at the ends of our ropes by the time it came time to go home, and we still got called back to the hall because their photo-delivery system wasn't working properly.
It was a lot. It wasn't the end of the world, and John comported himself rather well all things considered; and I had the good sense to not schedule anything else during the day. But it was pretty rugged. And we have to go back next week to pick the passport up. We're praying for a shorter ordeal next time. It's incredibly frustrating when bureaucracy doesn't work. I understand why it exists; bureaucracy does amazing things, in exchange for its labyrinthine puzzles. But when it doesn't even have the common courtesy to function on its own terms? That's hard to stomach.