Today’s Nightmare Fuel Is Loads Of Vic Passports Being Delayed ’Cos Of The Fkn Printing

Apparently printing problems are partly to blame for a hefty backlog of passports in Vic and honestly, this has taken me back to the morning of every Year 12 English assignment. It’s like printers know when you need them most and choose that very moment to absolutely break down.

As first reported by The Herald Sun, a borked passport printer is apparently causing loads of chaos for people trying to get their travel docs. Sources told the pub the printer was behind the delays.

The Herald Sun also reported it heard from folks waiting for their passports that they’d been told a “printing error” was behind the hefty wait times.

According to News.com.au the Department Of Foreign Affairs and Trade said the issue was caused by “intermittent data transfer issues affecting print output”, not necessarily the printer itself.

This is big “desperately trying to hook up your shitty laptop to the school computer room printer via Bluetooth because your assignment is due in 10 minutes” energy. We’ve all been there. Including the passport office, apparently.

The Australian Passport Office has previously said that in the first three months of 2022, it issued almost 400,000 passports. For context that’s over double the number for the same period in 2021. Phew.

According to the Australian Passport office you should give yourself a minimum of six weeks to renew or get a new passport. So in short, wait times are already incredibly fucked. You deffo don’t want to be adding a printing-slash-data problem into the mix.

Over in Sydney earlier this year, passport queues at the DFAT office were so bloody huge that some folks legit paid other people to queue for them.

“Need someone to wait in the line at the passport office at Haymarket while I am at work,” said one Airtasker request per The Sydney Morning Herald.

Honestly, I feel incredibly bad for the workers drowning in a mountain of passport requests and for travellers anxiously waiting for their docs to get sorted.

Hot girl European summer is all very well and good, but if your passport is looking a little out of date you might want to hop onto that renewal ASAP. And manifest the printers are all working on top form.

More Stuff From PEDESTRIAN.TV