It all started when my brother took a trip to Peru and suggested I meet him there for a time. I am not one to take such a large trip so unexpectedly, but this time I actually got a little of the fever and would have gone, except for one minor detail. I didn’t have a passport, and wouldn’t be able to get one in time to make the trip.

Because of this I decided to get a passport even though I had no where in particular to go. I typed up all the paperwork on my old Smith and Corona and had some pictures made at Walgreen’s. The fiasco of getting those pictures made should have been an omen, but I ignored it, to my own peril. The photographer was a crotchety old lady who first informed me they had no return policy if the pictures were unusable for the document, and then went on to screw up my pictures three times in a row. I felt a little on display the whole time, as I had to stand in the middle of the drug store, in front of a white screen, and pose for the entire mass of patrons.

When I got to the post office to sign up it turned out that the pictures were, in fact, of incorrect measurements and I had been made the fool. Handing in my paperwork proved an error as well and I was forced to take more pictures and fill out the paperwork at the office from scratch.

I was told that with in five work weeks I would receive my passport. I waited with baited breath. I had not realized that a certified copy of your birth certificate was acceptable, and they had shipped my original off to Chicago and then to some other agency in New Orleans. My fear was that it would get lost in the mail and I would have to deal with that bureaucratic nightmare, or that worse, my identity would be stolen and my lack of credit would turn to very very bad credit very very fast.

When the five weeks were over I had no passport in hand and was starting to get anxious. Visions of a scuzzy man in a cutoff flannel, a forward-facing ball cap, and a missing tooth bearing a license with my name and his picture was starting to wake me up at night. To make matters worse, as I was lying there in that darkness I would torture myself with scenarios as to why it was so late. I began to conjure images in my head of John Ashcroft in some smoke-filled shadowy room leaning over my passport application and figuring it for a terrorist plot. “Why would someone need three separate addresses for home, permanent, and shipping? Looks like we got a candidate for Gitmo Bay. I think the cell next to Jose Pedia is open.”

I decided to take initiative and check the web-site to track the passport. It turned out that there was a 1-900 number to call and it was over a dollar a minute. I was stupefied. I wondered why my tax dollars didn’t pay for this service. The first question under the infamous FAQ section was, “Don’t my tax dollars pay for this?” The answer was simple, “No”. There was not even an attempt to explain this gross example of theft by our federal government. It also said that it could be six weeks for it to arrive. This got me off the hook in terms of dealing with a large bureaucracy, which is a situation I not so secretly loath.

After that extra week I waited another week just out of apathy and dread of dealing with these people who had already caused me so much stress by doing nothing at all. I finally called the number after work one afternoon and there were no live people to help me, as the office was closed. One dollar down the drain. I listened to the time it was open and adjusted for time zones and figured I had to call in the morning before work. After a few more days of putting it off because I didn’t want to deal with the tangle of government red tape I called in the morning and realized that my temporal calculations for the office hours were absolutely wrong and the office was open exactly at the time I was at work. I actually had to take off work in order to pay money to call some dimwit overweight government worker, whom my tax dollars already pay and who would no doubt tell me there was nothing to be done. I was infuriated, and put off doing this for weeks hoping the passport would come.

It was also around this time that a noticed I particularly disturbing trend in my attitude at work. This disposition had to do with the secretary and her duty to page everyone in the building when they get a call. I rarely get calls except from My Absentee Manager. I had requested the passport to be sent to work. This was a security precaution because I didn’t want it lying around in my mailbox, once again, to protect against identity theft. I rarely get packages at work. So rarely that when I do the secretary usually lets me know by paging me, and when I call her she tells me. This secretary did not know that I had applied for a passport. Nevertheless I was so expecting her to page me when it came in that after the five weeks were up that I started to unconsciously pricking my ears when I heard a page. Over the next few weeks the special notice to the pages became a special annoyance because they weren’t for me. Then slowly but surely, as if Wormwood himself were whispering in my ear, I started to get annoyed with the secretary herself.

Wormwood is a character in the Screwtape Letters. He is a demon tempter to whom his affectionate uncle Screwtape (the undersecretary of tempters) is writing advice. Interestingly, one can glean from the letters that the main job of a tempter is not to put ideas into people’s heads, as one might think. It’s to keep them out. C. S. Lewis was a firm believer that the Truth is real and any education, any true knowledge is a benefit. It would be the job, therefore, of malignant beings, to keep one from recognizing the fact of the world around oneself and stay in unbothered self-interested bliss.

The main fact I kept from myself was that the secretary not only didn’t know I was eagerly expecting a passport, but it isn’t even her job to page me if she receives mail for me. By blocking these facts, I allow that little bit of annoyance to turn more and more into a little bit of anger, and, if kept unchecked, a little bit of hate. The clincher would be that I wouldn’t even know why I hated this secretary, only that somewhere in the distant past she had wronged me. I never had to be told by this demon to hate, I only had to be kept in ignorance of the facts and my own human mistrusts, paranoias and frailties would handle the rest. It was the type of set-up of which Screwtape would have been most proud. No direct assault wasting valuable effort, only a sly psychological movement using the opponent’s (or as Screwtape would call him, the patient’s) weight against them, like Judo.

One day I was paged for some minor point and when I hung up the phone I felt a particularly fierce shot of rage. Shortly thereafter I realized how utterly stupid my anger was and began to laugh–this passport fiasco was tearing me apart. I was taking vacation soon and would be able to call this infamous agency on my time off, but until then I could only wait and hope the little blue book came.

The week before my vacation my Absentee Manager was actually at work and saw me sitting around doing nothing, so sent me home an hour early. I think it was the only time in my whole career at the lab that I’ve spontaneously gone home early. I got home and immediately called the 1-900 number to find out my status. The lady on the other end was not a bothersome bureaucrat as I feared, but was very helpful. Oddly enough, because she was very helpful, the picture in my head was that of a thin, demure, and sharp-witted woman. After hanging up I reflected on how the physical picture in my head corresponded with the help I received and cursed Plato for his unity of the virtues. The passport lady told me that it had been sent out on time and the only thing I could do was go down to the regional agency, fill out a certificate of non-receipt and get another passport. I had in effect lost my birth certificate and had to start all over. I then knew the truth: that once you get the ball rolling on red tape, the only way to be out of it is to kill yourself.

I now had to take a day out of my vacation to go to some huge government building in the Central Business Distract and wait in lines to be sent to new line, and asked questions so I could be sent to other lines. I got on-line at work the day before my vacation started and printed out the forms I needed to fill out. It was a little slow that day so I had an idea. Maybe I should go over to the secretary and ask her if she got anything for me in the mail lately. After thwarting Wormwood through the knowledge of her lack of knowledge I decided this might be wise. So, with my passport now almost two months late, I walked to the other building and approached her desk. “You haven’t, by any chance, gotten a package or something for me recently have you.” I explained the whole situation to her (leaving off the part about hating her for no good reason). She mustered a confused yet pondering look on her face and said, “No . . . not that I remember. . . . Have you checked your mailbox?” My response was simple.

“What mailbox?”

Thus it was that I learned that my Absentee Manager has a mailbox and the metals department itself has a mailbox. By process of elimination, me being the only other person in the department, this was my mailbox. My passport with my birth certificate had been sitting in it for over a month.

Phillip G.

Literature