Get home, unpack, chuck my dirty shirts in the washing machine, go to the pub, go home, sleep.
Next morning. Open the washing machine. Take out the shirts. What’s that lump in the breast pocket? Oh shit, it’s my passport.
Passports don’t look good after going through the washing cycle. Like the preparatory mush you make for papier mache.
The UK passport office comes up trumps. Within 36 hours of extracting that soggy mess from my shirt pocket, I have a replacement passport. Thanks.
What’s more, instead of the expected pitying smile and snidey joke when I told them what I’d done, the passport people were friendliness and helpfulness personified.
But my new passport has a chip and an antenna in it, and I wonder, in a paranoid way, whether the info they've stored in it includes: "The kind of idiot who puts his passport in the wash."
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Comments (2)
Exactly the same thing happened to me earlier this year - got home knackered, threw clothes into the washing machine, collapsed, woke up to laundered passportage. And this was a couple of weeks before a visit to the US.
I could - and did - get a new passport in a day, and a US i-visa in three. Which was a relief (turns out that i-visas are automatically put to the front of the queue): I missed the AMD Barcelona launch, but that was all.
The RFID chip is currently fairly harmless; it's only got the information on it that's on the passport page. And when I went through an RFID-reader enabled immigration check in the US, the official swiped my passport in the usual way (I guess because it had a visa) rather than RFIDing it. The whole business is rendered terminally stupid by two facts: the chip is only guaranteed for two years, and if it stops working the passport remains just as valid.
Posted by Rupert Goodwins | October 8, 2007 10:49 AM
Posted on October 8, 2007 10:49
Thanks Rupert, it's very good to know I'm not the only one. Interesting to hear about the RFID chip - how crazy!
best wishes
David
Posted by David Manners | October 8, 2007 10:54 AM
Posted on October 8, 2007 10:54