Invitation to Taiwan and a Lesson on National Security

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A couple weeks before the end of session I got an email asking me if I would like to join a delegation of Democratic National Committee members to visit Taiwan to meet with governmental and political officials. They evidently do this every year with a group of DNC and a group of RNC members.

Of course, I said yes.

Only problem was that I didn't have a passport and I had less than a month to get one at a time when articles were appearing in the news about how extraordinarily long it has been taking to get passports.

So I went and got a copy of my birth certificate at the Bureau of Vital Statistics, filled out all the paperwork for the passport, got my tiny pictures taken at CVS and headed to the Post Office. (all of that wasn't as simple and straightforward as it sounds - thanks again, LK for helping me that day.) Oh, and note that nowhere on the passport application does it say that you need your birth certificate, but you do.

I paid the extra money to expedite the processing of the passport and bought 2 overnight postal envelopes - one to send the application in and one for the passport to be overnighted back to me.

I waited a few days after sending in the application to allow it to get into the system then called Congressman Doggett's office to see if they could help it move more quickly. A couple days later his office called to say that the application was nearly complete and should arrive within a few days. That would mean that it took only 2 weeks if it arrived when it expected.

So, that Saturday morning I was quite happy to open my mailbox and find the overnight envelope I had filled out two weeks previously - until I opened the envelope. Instead of my passport and birth certificate, there were the documents of a woman who evidently grew up in Louisiana.

This was a somewhat distressing development. My first hope was to find the woman and see if she got my passport. Since the passport only shows where one was born and not where they currently live, finding her was not easy.

I couldn't find her with the normal internet searches, but noticed in one of the advertisement boxes for a public records search on the search results page listed a woman with her name living in Austin. That seemed like quite a coincidence, so i paid the $7 to the public records company and sure enough; it was her.

She had not received my passport. Monday came and she called to tell me that she still hadn't received it and I was concerned that if I called the Passport offices, they would cancel my passport as lost and I would have to start the process over again.

But that night when I got home and checked the mail, there it was.

So, an office that is at the fore of our Homeland Security mailed me someone else's passport in the envelope I provided them, then mailed me my passport a couple days later. Doesn't that make you comfortable?

Oh well, I got my passport. I'm heading to Taiwan.

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Comments

[M. Holmes]

Change of identity
Well, you could have gone to China in drag.