Passport interview

This morning I was hoping to go out and do a test pano under some trees to see how bad the alignment problem is, but Clare and Brian both went out so I had to stay in to look after granny and answer the door if any parcels arrive.

When granny got up about 11am she asked me to pull off the dandelion flowers from the back garden. So I did that, although I don't know why she hates them so much. I think the garden looks very boring when its just plain green grass.

A parcel arrived me, I wasn't sure what it was since I couldn't remember ordering anything recently. I just hoped that my SB800 hadn't been sent back to me after finding what the problem was with a quote for fixing it and a bill for checking it and posting it back. Luckily it wasn't, it was my 1TB hard drive I ordered the other day. I sold my 160GB maxtor external drive to Rad for £20 so I needed some more space to store stuff on. For the moment I think I should be able to have my 2x500GB and 1x1TB internal drives for normal use, and my 2x500GB and 320GB external drives for backup.

After checking my email and some photography websites I did a bit of web development. Clare and Brian came back, then Brian went out again and me, Clare and granny had lunch about 1pm. After lunch I did more web development work.

At 2.45pm I decided to leave the house to get the 15.38 to Leicester. Before I went I had a quick look at the instructions on how to get to the passport interview office, and it said it was about 2 miles from the station. I had thought it was only 5 or 10 minutes away, on the map it looked like it was quite close to the station. So I walked quite quickly to the station, hoping that I might be able to get the 15.08 to Leicester. I thought it would be unlikely that I would be able to get there that quickly since the station is probably a couple of miles away and walking as fast as I can I can only do about 2 miles in 30 minutes.

I did get to the station in time for the 15.08, so I guess the station is nearer than I thought. According to the departure board, the train was a couple of minutes delayed and was due at 15.10, but when I went up to the platform, the train was already there. I went towards the train, but then the doors closed before I got there. Luckily one of the staff saw me running and their door was still open, so they let me get on in the staff section.

Sitting on the train was very nice, watching all the countryside go by. The rapeseed fields are nice and yellow at the moment, and I saw some cows with calves as well.

When I got to Leicester I walked around trying to follow the map I printed off multimap.com to find the passport interview centre. When I found it I still had about half an hour to go until my interview, so I just walked around for a bit until it was 10mins before the interview, as you're meant to arrive 10minutes early.

I went in and had to sign a signing in book and the bloke at the front desk gave me a security badge thing and told me where to go, which was the third floor and then to your right as you come out of the lift. The entrance to the passport interview place had a locked door, and a button that said 'press to ring bell'. I pressed it, and there was no indication that it worked but after a few seconds a lady walked down the corridor towards me and opened the door.

The corridor went to a large room with a reception desk one end, I was told to go and sit there and the guy at reception would ask me a couple of questions. The guy there told me he was going to ask me some questions to make sure the information to be printed on my passport is correct. He asked me to spell out my full name, my date of birth, and what my address was (didn't have to spell out the address). A couple of points about this:

1. Why do they need to check my details are correct when they have already had my birth certificate and if my address wasn't correct how would I have got the letter to attend this interview.
2. There were other people in the room attending interviews who could easily hear my answers. Clearly the government are not really concerned about identity theft.

After this the guy asked me where I wanted to go when I got my passport. I told him maybe Japan. He said "Well, if you go to Japan go to the Kawasaki factory for me, will you?". I know he was just trying to make conversation, but what a stupid way to do it.

1. If I go to the Kawasaki factory what benefit does this have for him? Does he think I'm going to go to Japan and when I get back create a fake identity so I can apply for another passport and come to the interview office again so I can tell him what it was like?
2. Why would I go to the Kawasaki Factory just because some random person in a passport interview office asks me to?

I just said that I doubted you would be able to look round the factory.

After this, he told me to sit in one of the chairs at the other end of the room, where there were a couple of other people waiting for their interviews. Here's a basic floorplan of the place:
At about 4.20pm I was called for my interview (the interview was meant to be 4.15pm). The interview took place in a kind of open cubicle, like they seem to have in American offices. Someone else was having their interview at the same time, so I could easily have listened to answers they were giving, or taken a tape recorder with me and recorded it if I wanted. Again, another point that the government are not doing this to stop identity theft.

First they asked me to spell out my full name, and give my date of birth and address again. Again, they said it was to double-check the details on my passport are correct. They said that after the interview, the information used in the interview about me and my family would be destroyed.

They asked me the town where I was born, whether I was registered to vote at my current address, what other adults live there, what my phone number is (I can't normally remember this but I think I remembered it correctly when they asked me), how long I had lived there, where I lived previously and how long I had lived there.

Then they asked financial questions, they asked if I had any loans, hire purchase agreements, mortgages, credit cards and checking accounts, and which bank/organisation they were with.

Then they asked questions about my referee, what his name was, what his job was and how old he was. Unfortunately, I got mental block and couldn't remember his name, though they said that was okay. I didn't know how old he was, so I told them what I thought his age probably was.

Lastly, they asked about my parents, their dates of birth (I knew Clare's since she was 50 this this year, but didn't know the year of Brian's birth), where they born (I didn't know) and when they were married (didn't know this).

Questions of this nature and about your referee (who is meant to be someone like your doctor or local Bobby) are pretty pointless really, its probably unlikely that most people would know the answer. I know that a lot of people don't know their parents birthday (or it might have been age) since that was a question on everybody votes on the wii recently.

Then after the interview a lady showed me out, I went back down in the lift, gave the badge back to the guy at reception and signed out.

So basically it was a waste of tax payers' (which includes me) money, a waste of my money (on the train fare and phonecalls to schedule the interview) and a waste of my time. The way the government tries to make out the purpose of this is stop identity theft/terrorism just makes it even worse.

After the interview I went straight back to the train station, I had to wait about 15mins for my train (the 17.05). When I got on the train there weren't any seats left so I just stood in the bit near the door. When we got back to Market Harborough I just walked staright home, and got about about 17.45, a few minutes before dinner.

After dinner I checked my work email, since yesterday work said they would certainly send something over to me by today, but they hadn't sent it. The rest of the evening I just went on the pinternet.

Food
Breakfast: Crunchy nut cornflakes; cup o' tea.
Lunch: Cheddar cheese sandwich; cherry tomatoes; grapes; slice of angel layer cake; cup o' tea.
Dinner: Sausages; mashed potato; baked beans. Pudding was Mackies normal and honeycomb ice cream. Coffee.