I did not expect that it was possible to spend six hours at a post office on a Saturday, just to turn in passport applications for the kids. Who knew?! At other locations, they make appointments. Not at Cadman Plaza in Brooklyn, though. Of course, after our ordeal, we heard that they take passport applications at the Main Library in Brooklyn on Saturdays, which we will try next time. In 4.5 years.

Last Saturday, the whole family trudged to Cadman Plaza, as the kids’ passports expire in June. These days, you need to have at least six months on your passport for many countries to allow you in, and since we want to travel later this year, I thought that we should jump on it. Funny, if you wait until the point that you are leaving within two weeks, you can go to the Passport Agency in Manhattan, which is supposed to be pretty efficient and quick. However, if you are the type to plan ahead, you are punished by having to deal with your local post office. And you are severely punished if you happen to be in Brooklyn.

Had it been our local post office in Santa Rosa, CA, it would have taken us an hour. We would have made an appointment, we would have shown up, waited a few minutes, and been done. I miss that post office! The people that work there are so pleasant. I didn’t mind going there. If there was a line, the employees worked hard to process people through quickly.

The Cadman Plaza post office is a very different experience, and not in a good way. Why they don’t make appointments is beyond me. We got there a little before 10 AM and were nearly the last people to get a number, even though their advertised hours are 9 AM until 4 PM. There was one person after us before they stopped giving out numbers. They had three windows that were technically open, but for most of the day only one or two was active. Each employee took more than an hour for lunch and at least one long break. Seriously?! In six hours? From 1-2 PM there was only one window open and a roomful of people waiting. And waiting.

During the many hours of standing, I noticed a lighted display that scrolled various messages next to one of the windows. It took a while, but I finally grokked that the lighted display was actually in demo mode . . . from 1998! So someone installed the lighted display 18 years ago and no one in the post office ever bothered to program the date, the time, or turn on the built-in Trivia function. They could not be bothered. Meanwhile, the thing has been ON for 18 years, saying absolutely nothing.  Which says a lot about the employees’ pride in their work. Or lack thereof.