I have been rejected (Blog 22 of 30)

Often when I am speaking at a new place, I will introduce myself by telling people that I have been going to church all my life and that my mom's side of the family is the churchy side and my Dad's is anything but.

That is true.  Some of my Dad's good buddies, many of whom used to hang out at our place from time to time, were well known to local law enforcement.  One of the guys died in the PA penitentiary.....  another ended up on the 6 o'clock news after he was killed in a drug deal gone bad.  I am serious when I say that I sort of get both sides of that street.

Today, I suspect that "Pippus side" of things may have caught up to me.

I went to renew my passport.  Simple right?  Fill out the short form (30 minutes tops).  Get new pictures.  Take the whole thing to the government office.  Get new passport in a couple of weeks. Relatively painless.

Me.... I did all the stuff above, however when I got to the desk the lady she looked everything over and said, "Ah ha..... ah ha..... good..... oh wait".  Then she proceeded to tell me that because my passport has water damage on it (it was in my coat pocket during a rain storm while I was riding my motorcycle through North Dakota) that the government would likely reject it as having "been tampered with".  She said I could try anyway, but once you send in a bad passport, they flag you.  Too many of them (she did not know how many) may make it hard to get any passport at all.

Her suggestion:  Let my current passport run out and then start all over again as if I never had one.  In other words, fill out the long form (including doing all the guarantor stuff) and then sit around for 4-6 weeks without a passport until my new one comes.

I was at the hockey game tonight and I asked everyone I saw (virtually) and no one has ever heard of this before.

I'm telling you..... the MAN is out to get me!!!!   Maybe I should consider changing my name. Throw them off the trail for a while.

If I wasn't secretly a Russian spy sent here to gather information about Canada, I would be really offended.