Renewing Passport III
It’s 0927H. I’ve just wasted a whole hour thanks to my own silly oversight. I thought I had all the documents they needed only to find out when I was called (just after I had published that last post) that I cannot use the same photo as that in my (now) old passport but must furnish a newly taken one.
That began a whole hour of looking for a place to take a photo, since the service run by the Immigration Department’s Cooperative became out of service the moment I got there. Fortunately, the lady behind the application counter didn’t make me start the whole queueing process again but was happy for me to go back to her once I was done. I know of places that would make you start all over again for not complying properly to begin with.
So I submitted my documents to her, together with the instant photographs that incidentally will probably go down in history as the nicest “official” photos I’ve ever had taken of me! She took my thumb-prints, both digitally (with a biometric reader) and the “old” way. I sat back down for about 5 minutes before she called me again to pay for the passport and I was out of there at 0940H. That’s not too bad, considering.
I have to go back on 27 February to collect the new document but for now, back to work!
Posted on February 25th, 2004 by jl
Filed under: My Malaysia
Excellent!
Nice to know you didn’t have such a bad time of it. Have a good week!
Hey Jikon. Interesting blog. Which immigration office did you go to? I’ve got to renew my passport soon, too.
Anis - thanks. I went to the one in Pusat Bandar Damansara. It wasn’t too bad, but certainly not as fast as the branch in Penang, as reported by some other commentators my recent posts.
approx. 1 1/2 hr to renew your passport. that’s not too bad, jikon.
to collect it of course would be faster. tell you a funny incident sometime back when my mum and i went to the immigration dept. we went very early at opening time (8.30am)… to collect our passport. when we enter the office. we were surprised that there were nobody inside. we saw a few workers hanging around and going up to the collection counter, a man approached me so i told him we were here to collect our passport and he immediately search for us and give us our passports. then as we turned to walk out, still wondering why nobody around, suddenly a guard came up and said “the office is not open yet. why are you in here? get out please”.
i was like going huh??? not open yet? no wonder nobody around. but why did the staff gave us our passports then? and nobody prevented us from entering the office too! (the guard was not around that time).
nevertheless we had a good laugh over it and were so glad that we get our passpost super duper fast!!