A day at the government office - 12/12/2007

So I'm going to break the surprises on this article. If you have to go to the government office for any issue, make it early. Preferably arrive at 8 o'clock - sharp.

This is what going to happen if you arrive at noon for renewing your mom-in-law's passport at the Damansara branch immigration office.

I and my mom-in-law arrived at the branch office around 12:30 PM (I took leave on that day). We went to the first counter to take our number after the staff checked our application with the appropriate document. Looking at the piece of paper, we have to wait for 80 people before we were able to submit our form. Keep in mind that there are round 20 counters and we thought this is going to be fast. Nope, it wasn't. There are less than half of the counters were open and one staff processing one application took like 15 minutes. My guess was that some of the staff were on lunch and the application is kinda complicated to process.

Suddenly, one of the staff show the system down sign on his counter and there were a announcement about it. That's too bad as there were 17 more before us and I was thinking of going home. My mom-in-law insisted of waiting since we came a long way. At that time, it was around 2:30 PM and we went to the nearby McDonald for lunch, as we don't know how long the system would back up again. After the 30 minutes lunch, we quickly went back to the office and luckily the system was back up again.

Then suddenly the whole office changed. People are rushing around and the number display jumping so fast as it was like stock market in bullish shape. In 15 mins, our number is called. (If you do the math before the system down, our number should be called around one hour. So what happened previously?) We went to the counter to submit our form, it took less than 5 mins. Yes, you read it right, 5 minutes! (So, what happened couple of hours ago? Should I called the X files team to investigate whether there are any extraordinary unidentified brainwave that caused staffs suddenly get so ultra productive. I really have no idea.)

By the time our number is called again to pay for the fee and collect the new passport, we was told to come back tomorrow because we submitted our application late. (!@#$%)

Although the government web site stated they open from 8 am - 4:30 pm, since you're not going to get your things done on the afternoon shift, considered they open from 8am - 11:00am.

ps: I thought of Damansara branch because it has the auto machine to processing the application, which is faster. I was wrong. We should have went to the Subang branch office as the processing is still took 2 hours to complete. :P