20.11.07

Taking care of business

It was a good thing I chucked my brand-new passport photos into my bag this morning, because I found myself with an unexpected couple of hours free between appointments this afternoon and decided that I'd best betake myself post-haste to the Immigration and Checkpoints Authority to get my passport renewed. Yes, I've learned my lesson.

At first I was blindly queueing up at the e-services terminal, but then it occurred to me to ask a human being instead --- particularly since the queue to speak to the human being was moving more efficiently than the one for the e-services terminal. As it turns out, to renew one's passport, all one has to do is a) request a form at the general enquiry counter, b) fill it up (the form promises to take no more than 3 minutes, and really, it doesn't), c) slap a passport photo onto it and d) drop it off in one of the many clearly marked deposit boxes for this purpose.

Oh, and you need to have a credit/debit card number that you can put down so that the government can take its $70 fee.

Since this über-efficiency meant that my passport-making errand took a lot less time than I expected, I found myself wandering the SMU campus with time to kill, which took me happily to the exhibition "Education at Large 1945-1965: Student Life and Activities in Singapore". As an interviewee in the exhibition's main film said, students used to get very passionate about ideologies and principles --- not about celebrity idols." (This may not be a verbatim quote, but you get her drift.)

Helpfully for people like me with mediocre Chinese abilities, a full English translation of the exhibition panels is available in a handy brochure. Go see!

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2 Comments:

At 11/20/2007 8:04 pm , Anonymous Anonymous said...

Did you know that you could have done the whole thing online? that's what we did when we applied for smallboy's passport. Very efficient huh? I must say i was quite impressed with how relatively hassle-free it all was.

 
At 11/20/2007 8:16 pm , Blogger Tym said...

Yep, but the last time I tried the online application (for my NRIC renewal), Terz couldn't get the file size for the passport photo image down to the server specs. So we gave up and I went and did it in person :P

 

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