I'm a G Now... But Oh Nooo!

Yes! Last Wednesday, I finally got my new G type passport. The one I've been waiting over a year to get. I was surprised to see that it wasn't the traditional green like the old ones and that instead was a navy blue. The weather was quite nice that day too, it even rained when I went back to college. I was so happy to get my new passport. But maybe, I should have paid attention to the omen of the day before...

The day before, Nahida showed me a couple pair of shoes of mine that had been taken to the shoe polisher. One of the pairs was fine even though it seemed like the shoe polisher might have over done it with that black mucky stuff, and the other which was brown and had become black too. How the shoe polisher could've been so thick is beyond me. I got a little mad saying I bought those shoes simply because I didn't have any brown shoes.

So I was really happy to finally have a passport and thus finally granted the right to travel out of this god-forsaken country should I ever be motivated enough to get off of my ass. I showed it to all my friends, saying "look I got my new passport!".

Nahida had warned me to check for any mistakes on the passport. And I swear that when I got it at the passport office, I did take a good look at it and noticed that they had misspelled my mother's name in English. My British passport doesn't include that bit of information and as long it was spelled right in Arabic I guessed it wasn't a big deal. Nahida mentioned that some people didn't even have their own faces on their passports. And as far as I was concerned my biggest worry was that they have my name misspelled in English.

It wasn't till I was on my way home, gleeing at my new passport that I finally saw that they had the month of my birth wrong. It said 01 instead of 10. Now, that's a screwed up mistake, the kind that makes it useless. It probably wouldn't be such a big deal for most, but passport control would be comparing it to my other passport and would notice the discrepancy. And maybe passport control has some kind of record on the computer they use too.

I just don't understand how I wasn't able to notice the mistake when I first got it. What screwed up part of my mind got me to convince myself that there was nothing wrong with the passport when I was inspecting it at the passport office. I know that that "01" caught my eye but then my subconsciousness somehow hi-jacked my mind and got me to ignore it. This kind of thing always happens to me when I get over-excited about something.

Nahida said she's going to take it back to the passport office on Sunday to fix it. From what I've understood from some of my friends is that the passport office would make a corrective note on the comments or something page, but that too isn't really great. I wonder if the date of birth is included in the machine readable bit.

Yesterday, I had a fight with Suzy over the phone because she's my partner in my project group and hasn't contributed at all up till now with something that doesn't really focus on our subject. She then tried to blame it on our other project partner saying that whenever she wanted to help type something up that the other partner would say that she'd do it herself and that I never asked her to do any real work either but had only asked her to read stuff which she didn't end up reading. I really didn't want to call her to fight with her but it ended up looking like that.

On the bright side though, I don't have to worry about impulsively flying off to anywhere since I still don't have a valid passport.