To play this game, you will need original documents and any expired documentation proving prior allegiance/existance to origin as well as current documentation proving you are still the same person. Photos may or may not help.
Step one: The Connections - make friends with your local (or regional) consolate which could be 3 days drive away. If anything goes wrong, and it probably will, its great to have a first name contact and phone number. You should also know that these people are very used to stressful babbling....
Well, if they weren't, they certainly are now.
Step two: The unauthorized birth certificate - this step is much more fun if you need your passport immediately and have no 'approved' birth certificate. In this case, a relative in your country of origin can send your document to said consulate via fax. Keep in mind here that when your said relative faxes the copy of your certificate, it does need to be carefully and thoroughly examined by the person in charge of authentication at your relatives respective post office or passport office. If it is simply faxed, you will regret it. This is a step that not all post offices, relatives or novices are aware of.
Step 3: The Guarantors - it is essential that your guarantor understand the difference between date formats between the USA and Australia. If the format is not written in day//month//year, and instead is written in month//day//year, you will be sentenced by formal letter to retraining classes on date formats, along with your guarantor, who will be regarded mearly as collateral damage. It will repeat until your application shows the correct format.
As well as this, if your guarantor is in local government, it is quite necessary for that individual to write 'local government' and not their actual occupation, even if he/she is the local chief of police and has stated as such in accordance with the list of authorized professions and corresponding profession number specified. Your regional consulate will send it back anyway, with the formal letter and the returned application. You will very quickly be retrained in this procedure as by this time, you will have approximately 3 days to achieve your ultimate goal, your passport in hand.
Step 4: The Follow Up - At this stage you should have one day left before you leave on your flight. Your passport application and faxed birth certificate should have arrived at the regional consulate, so take note that a call to your consulate will be necessary in order to reset your stress button, and to assure that your application has not yet been processed. Here you will learn that your birth certificate although faxed and received in perfect condition was not authenticated by the local post office of your respective relative (refer to step 2). At this point you may or may not cry or 'freak out'. The latter is suggested as it will bring swift results.
Step 5: Post Freak Out - You will find that despite retraining and repeated applications, your passport will be processed as an emergency official document due to time restraints. You the player, will discover that your name has been passed through all the delegates from Washington DC to Canberra due to your unauthorized birth certificate. While this can be somewhat daunting, as sudden onset fame often is, you will discover that the Australian passport office will have managed to entirely complete your emergency passport in the space of 2 hours, to be returned on the day of departure to you, the player.
Step 6: Return of Documents and Certification - By now, you will be known to them on a first name basis and later have your case used as a training exercise. This may or may not happen in the advanced novice stages of the game. Should this occur, the player really should be awarded certification for stress management and logistics and be paid for training the civil service, for crying out loud... and should be awarded a medal for investigation particuarly if told their missing returned drivers license was in a particular envelope of a specified color and was not, and instead somewhere completely different that the Creator Himself wouldn't dream of looking until approximately 3 weeks later...
...naturally the former comes much later in the process of the passport game; see steps 5-200, but was worth a mention for those passport game professionals who may just need a refresher.
Special thanks to the Australian passport office staff in Washington DC for their amazing support and help in getting my passport through in time!!
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