MAROON BOOKLET

The number of crowd on the tent , 6:15 in the morning

Work in renewing my passport has become pending lately, I was supposedly should have renewed my papers way back December last year, but due to holiday season it sorted to fall behind and had waited this January. By the time I had to have it renewed , again it was set back a few days because of a national holiday when the Pope visited this country. Now after clearing all the holidays that went, I decided to make an appointment online on this so called passport services.

Unfortunately this so called online passport services my country brags a lot end up to a big disappointment , and to simply say the services they provide are not poor but horrible. If I would compare the services they were doing several years back to present - I would definitely say that passport services years back was better considering that Online appointment system was not implemented yet. For migrant workers you can get a passport within less than 5 hours while normal passport applicants can get it within 10 days maximum.

Nowadays this Online passport service is not a big help but a burden and they gave a scheduled appointment a month away from now, what's worst was that this excludes that processing time of another seven days - totalling up to thirty seven days ( 37 days) and this is if I put it in "rush" processing which basically is worthless given that I still have to wait for seven days. Overall passport services in the country are pathetic and more expensive than it was several years back.

Given with this options I was left with no choice but to gate crash my way to the DFA office in Robinsons mall, and go thru the trouble of waking up as early as 3am. Assuming on what career ship management told me was correct, there should be no "appointment" system here and can simply get a passport here easily.

Anyway in the Philippines , government offices here have a nasty habit of forcing people to wake up as early as 3am (in an indirect way) , Now a days it's becoming a trend now.  NBI, PCSO, DFA, POEA, etc. all these government agency workforce has all the same kind of bull shit , poor public service !!!

There's a rumour I heard from one of the passport applicants that the reason why DFA (department of foreign affairs) decided to de centralized the issuance of passports to different malls was because the main area of DFA was already festering with "FIXERS" , and to avoid the various scams running around on their office , they decided to spread it out. Unfortunately for a typical Filipino citizen  it was a big inconvenience on the fact that passports takes a long time to process and get a passport.

the actual waiver of DFA 

Anyway on my time waiting, I fell asleep on the waiting area which is just a public walkway with a tent. When I woke up , the security guard was already distributing a piece of paper and one by one checking out photo copies of our documents. It was about 10am when Robinsons mall opened , and I had to fall in line again to get an application form , it was already about 15 to 25 minutes when we got inside. Good thing that the process inside didn't took that long and it was about exactly noon when I was finished. Aside from the application form for the passport , we were given another paper which we had to sign and looked more like a waiver which tells that passports fees are non-refundable if we decide to back out while midway on the process , we won't get our money back (make me think this is a scam) and notifies that 7 days processing isn't exactly seven days, (they hinted that there's some sort of problem on the printing machine)

Once inside , the first step was go to window one which the receptionist there just checked if my photocopies are all in order and if I had all the necessary original documents (old passport, seaman's book , SRC card , and a third part ID - I used AMOSUP sailors union card). After the first step , I had to wait for the electronic queue to go to the second window . Basically the second window just checks if all the entries on the application form are correct and ask me if I want my passport to be processed on regular or express . I opted express then after that proceeded on the third booth which is the accounting , obviously its function is to pay for the passport services . The last part will be encoding booth, which took an ID picture and lets me check if the information to be put on the computer is correct, after wards they told me the claim schedule on what date I'd get my passport. Then that's it!!!  I'm off in the DFA "consular" mall office.

EXPRESS ISNT EXACTLY INSTANT

For the general public's information, as of 2015 . Passport fee are 950 PHP for regular processing which takes roughly 14 working days (take note working days not regular days). And 1200 PHP for express which takes half the time and seven working days only. The funny thing about this service is the "Express" part which is not exactly "express", I mean why the hell would they say its express if they don’t exactly mean it eh ? The only difference is a week which the difference is barely noticeable. On my personal stand point this is one of the many noticeable "legal" scams in department of foreign affairs, the only difference of express and regular is that its only called that but the time of processing is just almost the same. In Europe and western countries , Government corruption is hidden and nobody admits it's - here in the Philippines its institutionalized and LEGAL , perhaps even encourage.

After the long hard difficult work of securing a passport , all i need is a nice cold tall glass of frappe from Starbucks