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A day ago, I got my renewed passport in the mail.\u00a0 I was very impressed at the turnaround on this, seeing as how I had applied for it a mere two weeks prior.\u00a0 I\u2019d been sitting on an email reminder to renew my passport from several months ago, but mythical wife and I had been kicking the idea around to go abroad for a vacation sometime within the next year, and the last thing I wanted was to have a passport on the cusp of expiration, and it causing all sorts of preventable complication later down the line.<\/span><\/p>\n A little over a year ago, I applied and received passports for both of my kids, and much like my own initial passport from eons ago, it was quite the nerve-wracking process of making sure I had birth certificates, proofs of residence, clothes, boots, motorcycle, etc.\u00a0 In fact, when I got my very first one, I had to actually go into Washington DC to the passport office due to some reason I can\u2019t remember, and even that was for a temporary, one-year only passport, all so I could go to fucking Toronto, of all places.<\/span><\/p>\n Either way, passports for my kids was like a turnaround of four months, and I\u2019m proud of myself for having the wherewithal to have started as early as I did, so that they would be done for the cruise that we went on just months after receiving them.<\/span><\/p>\n When I expressed to my friends at how pleased I was that I got my renewed passport in just two weeks, like most of the shit I say to the group chat with most of my friends, it was met with silence, and then eventually some of my wiser guys blurting out that it\u2019s not impressive since renewals are usually faster than getting brand new passports.<\/span><\/p>\n Yes, that may be the case, as I recall my last renewal taking maybe 6-8 weeks, but this was fucking two.\u00a0 Even the passport office dot gov website had predicted a turnaround of like, end of March, which would still be more than sufficient to my potential summer needs, but then I started getting status update emails that already had tracking numbers and an expected delivery date of February 20.<\/span><\/p>\n I made a joke to my friends that we could all agree that just about everything in Washington is a putrid wasteland of process, corruption and bullshit, but whatever\u2019s going on at Passport Services, I had just gotten a renewal done and delivered in just two weeks.\u00a0 But like I said, crickets.<\/span><\/p>\n What I\u2019m getting at is that it\u2019s apparent that there\u2019s nobody in the world more impressed with mediocrity than me.\u00a0 I\u2019m so nihilistic, so jaded, and so pessimistic about the state of America and the rest of the world, that when people in the world simply perform to their baseline job descriptions, I\u2019m fucking over the moon.<\/span><\/p>\n Yeah, I know that my generally droll outlook isn\u2019t necessarily the best looking or something to be proud of, but I can\u2019t help it.\u00a0 I get so disappointed when people fail to meet my expectations, the only seemingly adequate defense mechanism to adopt is to assume utter incompetence across the board, to where when people deliver mediocrity, my mind is blown away and it brings me great joy that there are occasionally competent people in the world.<\/span><\/p>\n And anyone who actually does go above and beyond for me, well, I had Yelp Elite status for like the better part of eight years because I was ready and willing to review a million stars to any businesses that impressed me with such.<\/span><\/p>\n Needless to say, while my friends might not be impressed with a two-week turnaround for a passport renewal, I was quite elated and impressed by it.\u00a0 Maybe some robots have taken over working at Passport Services, because everything else in Washington DC is steaming hot bullshit, and I can\u2019t imagine any possible other alternative to a task being done so exceptionally, than if it were done by artificial intelligence.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A day ago, I got my renewed passport in the mail.\u00a0 I was very impressed at the turnaround on this, seeing as how I had applied for it a mere two weeks prior.\u00a0 I\u2019d been sitting on an email reminder to renew my passport from several months ago, but mythical wife and I had been … Continue reading Nobody is more impressed with mediocrity than me<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[36,100,73,78,83,52,156,25],"class_list":["post-51081","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-brog","tag-angst","tag-comparison","tag-friends","tag-lowered-expectations","tag-observations","tag-owned","tag-social-media","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51081","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=51081"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51081\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51082,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51081\/revisions\/51082"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=51081"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=51081"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=51081"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}