Letters | Welcome to Passport Hell

Welcome to Alice in Wonderland's Passport Hell. In this Passport Hell, much like Alice in Wonderland's nightmarish magical land, up is down and down is up. You take your application with all the necessary documentation to a designated acceptance agency six months before your trip, long before you're told you have to.

Then you wait, and you wait, and you wait. 5 weeks . . . 10 weeks . . . 15 weeks.

No answers come from Passport Hell. The Web site allegedly designed to provide information to you regarding your application will tell you your application is "being processed." But that's it. You get no further information.

When you attempt to contact the 877 number to get information from Passport Hell, you're told that you can't get an answer regarding the status of your passport application until two weeks before you're traveling, too late to do any good. If you go ahead and call anyway, you're often cut off after waiting 20 minutes and have to start all over again.

Meanwhile, you're worrying that you've spent thousands of dollars on a vacation or business trip, hundreds or thousands of dollars you may have thrown away if your passport doesn't arrive in time.

So you contact the people that might be able to guide you out of passport Hell, the Mad Hatter and the March Hare, er, your U.S. representative or senator. If you get a staff person, you're told that "others were here in line before you, we're doing the best we can."

So some people actually obtain online bootleg lists of desk telephone numbers of State Department employees, including the gatekeepers of Passport Hell. You may find out some information.

Hopefully, people will wake up from Passport Hell and wake up at the picnic with their passport.

Bob Magee

Cherry Hill, N.J.

I'm a pusher.

Yes, I confess to it. In becoming a pusher I found it advantageous to take on associate pushers, my daughters, Yelane and Nan. And we have a user: My wife, Sandy.

We are pushers, of her wheelchair.

Sandy slipped. Fell. Broke her fall with her wrists and broke a bone on her foot. It's six to eight weeks of crutches, and a wheelchair. While being in a wheelchair is uncomfortable, and highly restrictive of normal activities, it does show how nice people can be. And from the pusher, there are lessons learned.

Be sure wheelchair brakes are on when the user is getting in or out of the chair. When going down a steep hill, do so backward. If passing those walking ahead, say "beep beep" as you go around.

The best lesson: It's better to be the pusher than the pushed!

Joe Ball

Bala Cynwyd