Nightmare of wasting bureaucracy’s time at the Irish passport office in London

Kafkaesque is defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary as “having a nightmarishly bizarre, complex or illogical quality”, and is defined by me as “the Irish passport office in London”.

A place where the air is made of despairing sighs, and tumbleweeds of hair torn out in frustration blown between the plastic seats.

Where the condensation running down the windows is the anguished tears of applicants, and the phone number you ring in desperation after sitting there all day is a recorded announcement telling you they are too busy to answer the phone.

Imagine you need to renew your passport for an imminent work trip to the US, because another monument to Kafka — Homeland Security — requires you to have one of those biometric ones or they won’t let you in.

So you make the 120 mile round trip from your house to the passport office, because it’s quicker to pick the application form up in person than to wait the two working days for the passport office to answer your email.

Then you make the trip again, to hand it in. Doing it by post takes eight weeks. This is the speedy option.

On arrival you take a number. Say, 99. And the number that is currently being dealt with is 67. So you sit, with 32 people ahead of you, amid the sighs and murmured hopelessness, and realise after an hour that the solitary person dealing with passports — alongside another solitary person dealing with visas — is averaging six applicants per hour.

By a conservative estimate, you might be seen — just to hand in the application form — by a week on Tuesday.

The solitary individual on passport duty ignores you when, after some considerable time, you interrupt his conversation about someone’s birth cert’s mother’s maiden name to ask — politely — if there is anyone else on passport duty that afternoon. A few people cheer. It’s that kind of huddled solidarity by now, where people are clinging together for support, the way they do during catastrophes and disasters. And administrative tyranny.

The man behind the glass wall does not make eye contact or acknowledge your existence, never mind answer your question.

The chap next to you has been waiting four hours to pick up his new passport — the act of handing it over would take seconds, but despite there being a raft of people working on the other side of the glass, nobody has been put on speed-things-up duty.

This is part of the Irish Embassy in central London, in 2016. There are passport offices in the arse end of the world that run more efficiently, that have better systems that do not involve getting snagged in this dystopian web of pointlessness. There’s not even loo roll in the loo. Cead mile faulty.

After a million hours, you present your passport for a biometric upgrade. And the punchline? “Your passport is already biometric,” says the man. “You don’t need a new one. Go home.” You fall to the ground, foaming at the mouth.