On my birthday a few weeks ago, I forced myself to wake up much earlier than usual. No, it wasn't an attempted lifestyle change or anything like that. A travel agency was handling the renewal of my recently expired passport, and they helpfully scheduled for me, a night owl, to appear at the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) at the ungodly hour of 9 AM... on my freaking birthday. (Thanks a lot, you guys. That was the best birthday gift ever. Now please die.)
I don't remember ever having to make a personal appearance at the DFA to get my passport renewed. Well, it's supposedly a new bureaucratic regulation imposed after 9/11 to ensure that the photos on terrorists' passports match their faces, because yeah, all local terrorists carry authentic Philippine passports.
And boy did the bureaucrats go overboard with the accurate photo thing. The DFA website has a three-page "guidelines on new photo requirements for machine-readable passport." I see that they have trimmed the PDF file down to a neat 850 KB. When I first downloaded the guidelines a few months ago, there were three separate files with a total size of 22.3 MB. Apparently, the morons who run the website have learned about the magic of JPEG compression since then... yay progress.
The document is a bureaucrat's wet dream. Some of the rules are somewhat reasonable, but others are just plain ridiculous. Take this one: "When having their photos taken, applicants may smile. The 'Mona Lisa' smile is recommended." Thank you, dear government, for giving us permission to smile like Mona Lisa. And this one: "Use of earrings for women is allowed, provided earrings are small. For men, the wearing of earrings is not allowed." Unfair! What happened to gender equality?
The rule I loath the most was "both ears of the applicant should be visible." I loath it because I have longish hair that covers both ears. If I were to change my hairstyle just for the passport picture, would I have to show my ears to pass airport inspection each time I travel? That's silly.
The rule has a loophole though: "It is all right if the ears of a Muslim applicant or an applicant who is a member of a Religious Order (nun) is not visible in the photograph." (Did you catch the wrong subject-verb agreement? "Ears is not visible," heh.) Unfortunately, I'm neither a Muslim nor a nun, so I had to pull my hair back behind my ears when I had my photo taken a few days before my DFA appointment. Doing so made me look like a dork... a gay dork. In retaliation, I refused to do a "Mona Lisa smile" for the camera. That in hindsight wasn't the best idea. I'm now doomed to look like an angry gay dork on my passport for the next few years. Yay me.
The third page of the document is full of sample photos that were rejected according to the guidelines (probably used without the consent of the poor rejected people in the pictures). Here are some of my favorites. See if you can guess why they were rejected.
Easy? Here are the answers.
Photo #1: hair across the eyebrow/eye area. Yeah, that strand of hair made her totally unrecognizable.
Photo #2: unnatural skin tone. Really? How do you know that's not his natural skin tone?
Photo #3: uneven skin color. Really? She looks fine to me.
Photo #4: yellowish skin tone. As an ethnic Chinese, I have this to say: Fuck you! I didn't choose to be born with yellowish skin! Racists pigs!
So would my photo be rejected? Judgment Day soon came along. I rushed my sleepy ass out the door at 8:30 AM on my freaking birthday to make the long drive to the DFA. Having never been there before, I promptly got lost. It was almost 10 when I finally found the shithole. No, it really was a shithole. The entrance to the passport renewal area was in a dark and stinky back alley, with a crowd of stinky people spilling out into the street.
Fortunately for me, my mother and my sister were there since 8, and they saved me a spot near the head of the queue. I usually have strong queuing ethics, but on this particularly day, I didn't care. I pushed my way through the crowd, ignoring the hateful stares. It was my birthday, and I deserved a break.
I stepped up to the window. The guy who was supposed to verify my identity barely glanced up at me and made me sign a form that I didn't bother to read. An angry old man behind a table then grabbed my hands, pushed my thumbs onto a dirty purple inkpad, then pressed them against boxes on the form. Um, I could have done that myself, but thanks for the hand holding.
The whole process took five minutes, and it only took that long because my mom kept peppering the bureaucrats with annoying questions about proper procedure for this and that. I briefly wondered if my mom has OCD and if it's hereditary.
Anyway, I'm glad that the whole thing is over with. As a reward for my efforts, I received a shiny new machine-readable passport with a horribly ugly picture a few days later. I know I should be ecstatic (oh thank you thank you, DFA), but I find myself dreading the day five years from now (I think... my passport is locked up in my drawer and I'm too lazy to check) when I'll have to do this shit all over again.
