... and there's more
So. I got home good and drunk on Friday night to discover a letter from the passport office telling me that they were rejecting my photographs because ... my head is slightly tilted. They included a helpful letter telling me to have more photographs taken which conformed to the instructions which they were enclosing. These were the same instructions they had included previously, and indeed the same instructions which are plastered all over the photo booth itself -- and which, being of adequate intelligence, I followed to the letter. *Nowhere on them does it say anything about the angle of the head*! Grrrr.
So I went off with another hard-earned £3.50, this time to the nearer-by photo booth at the station. It appeared to be the same as the one I had previously used at Boots; it had the same Photo-Me branding, and the same excessive passport photo instructions pasted all over it. So I dunked my coins in and waited for the slightly alarming disembodied lady to begin shouting her instructions at me.
Unfortunately, despite giving every appearance of being identical to the last Photo-Me booth I had used, it turned out that this was in fact a really old, non-digital one. So just as I bent down to check that my coins had registered, there was a flash. And just as I figured that that was my only chance, and opened my mouth to say "oh no!", it turned out to be an even older photo booth than I thought -- and flashed again. I did at least manage to stay still for the next two flashes, but in all the excitement I ended up with the wild-eyed, confused and not a little terrified appearance of someone slowly realising they are being caught in the middle of a criminal act. And if I look like that when I walk through passport control, then I don't fancy my chances much by the time I reach customs.
Damn it.
Don't know who I blame most, the passport office for their refusal to give you all the instructions before you spend your first £3.50, or myself for forgetting about the existence of old-school non-digital photo machines. They're nonces and I'm a spaz.
posted by Raps @ 2:41 PM
2 Comments:
Just checked your blog on the offchance, not really believing that anything would have struck you as blogworthy since 'the revel is in the retail' (how many times did I see that before i gave up checking?!), and HURRAH, TWO whole new posts. Most amusing about ye olde boothe - you've not told us about that!
x
ha! I too have recently been to the shiny-on-the-outside, C&A-on-the-inside, photo booth in Oxford train station. I came out with 4 wild eyed photos, each in funnier colours than the next and with various combinations of grimacing and tilt.
Next, I personally went to the Passport Office in Victoria in order to avoid the post office. (I have come to believe that post offices, along with the underground and casualty, might be a place where mental illness can rub off.)
Anyway, after some deli-counter style ticketed queueing bomb searches, my head was tilted too - at first. After some discussion, and lots of looking me up and down, the team of passport professionals decided that the photos were was OK after all. Perhaps my head is tilted in reality? What if one's head *was* tilted in reality? Certainly there are always people queueing in the post office with all kinds of strange shaped heads.
Now, I have the passport back, and they've done some kind of transparency trick on the image - my head floats on the checkered page, I am ghostly pale, and have nearly no hair at all. I will be surprised if I ever cross any borders with it at all. Tilting. Ach.
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