New Things
First public photo.
A new blog, a new life and a new little one…to mark the official beginnings of something in this modern world, what better place to start than with bureaucracy?
Wee little B was born a few weeks ago, and now that home life has settled down, M and D decided that it was about high time to get her a passport. No, we don’t have any plans to leave the country any time soon, but we feel a little bit naked without the ability to travel. (D is also Canadian, and in the event that we want to go visit his homeland on short notice, who wants to wait the 6+ weeks that the Department of State requires?)
Things didn’t seem so bad at first…
at least not until we started looking into the timeline associated with the different steps. Before you can do anything with a wee one, you need a birth certificate from the county. This seems very reasonable, except for the fact that the county claims that it will take six weeks until they will be able to issue the certificate. This means that you can’t even start any of the other application processes until then. We’re not quite sure of what exactly they are doing during those six weeks (maybe they have really slow typists?) but it seemed kind of extreme.
One of our contacts at the hospital helpfully hinted that it didn’t always take that long. ”Great,” we thought, we’ll just give the SF Department of Vital Statistics a call at the number provided and see if the certificate is available. Unfortunately for us, that phone number has been “helpfully” replaced with the new unified San Francisco 311 service. This is supposed to be the be-all and end-all of city service numbers, enabling you to accomplish almost anything that needs to be done through the city. In our case, this meant that they weren’t actually able to look up the specific certificate availability at all, but they were happy to advise us again that the standard processing time was six weeks. (On a side note, I had reported some potholes to 311 a while ago, which were supposed to be fixed within 72 hours, but those were still a problem as of this writing too…so I have to say that my experiences with 311 have not been stellar so far.)
Anyway, D decided to make a trip down to their office after about two weeks to see if he could get the certificate. After waiting in line for 20 minutes, the clerk cheerfully informed him that the certificate was not in the system yet. The one good thing that came out of the procedure was that the helpful clerk gave D an actual phone number for their office–415-554-2722–where you can actually leave a message for one of the guys that work there and ask them to look up the certificate availability without having to march over in person.
Armed with that knowledge, I was able to call them a week later, and they finally confirmed that the certificate was available. I marched over that day and picked up two copies…although I probably should have requested more in hindsight, since everyone who needs official documentation wants to see it, and some will actually want to keep it for an extended period of time (such as the State Department during the 6-week passport application process).
Getting the birth certificate was the first step, and my early success of getting the certificate after “only” 3 weeks leaves me cautiously optimistic that the rest of the process won’t be as bad as I might have feared! Little B’s further documentation requests will be the subjects of future posts…
Tags: 311, baby, birth certificate, San Francisco