It’s all about the paperwork

Sharp-eyed readers may have noticed a new name under a familiar photo in the pages of NCBR. Our own Ms. Kristen Bastian is now officially Mrs. Dominic Tatti — and we all wish the pair many wonderful years together.

Once she gets all the paperwork done, of course.

Let’s see how many places she’ll have to change her name. There’s the Social Security number, which requires obtaining a copy of your birth certificate from the state where you were born. As the most populous state in the Union, New Jersey is notoriously slow about filling such requests — if you can get through to someone actually willing to help.

Even then, the result is all about aggravation, and I’m sure the process is now further complicated by the ICE “crackdown” on illegal workers using stolen identities. But hey, Kristen’s mom is on the case, and if she can’t do it, we may have a final final job for Tony S.

Then there’s the driver’s license. The cluster of chaos and inefficiency otherwise known as the Colorado Department of Motor Vehicles in Loveland ate up most of Kristen’s morning yesterday, but at least she was simply updating information on a current license. Not nearly as much fun as getting my 87-year-old mother-in-law a Colorado ID when she moved from California with an expired license. Thank goodness Cook County, Illinois, still has birth records going back that far — and she wasn’t born on a farm downstate where such niceties were often overlooked back in the day.

Then there’s the bank accounts, which may or may not require a copy of the marriage license, which has to be recorded with the county before a copy can be made. And the list goes on: health insurance, credit cards, phone bills and directory listings.

Did I mention passports?

Is there anything the Department of Homeland Insecurity has touched that hasn’t turned into an instant cockup? Can’t these people count?

Take the number of passengers on flights to Mexico and Canada and the Caribbean last year, plus the number of people who waited in line to drive or walk across the border, plus the number of passports expiring this year, and divide that by the number of applications that can be processed in one day by one office multiplied by the number of passport offices, and bingo! You come up with the amount of time needed to implement a requirement that everyone traveling to those places have a passport in hand.

By not trying to subtract out repeat visitors or any of that pointy-headed down-to-the-last-decimal-place stuff, you have automatically allowed a cushion big enough to account for the learning curve of new hires required to keep up with the increased demand. Even the NCLA could get those numbers right.

Just imagine the paperwork rounding up all 12 million undocumented immigrants could generate.

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