Home affairs hell

After reading Mrs M's fury with home affairs today, I can't help but add my 2 cents to the mounting criticisms of this ridiculous department that even dares to call itself a department - as if it runs like one. More like an unorganised cattle market.

Home affairs has become like a swear word in this country. I've heard that here in Maritzburg you have to get up at 4 in order to even get to the counter to even get your hands on an application form for an ID. Everyone has a horror story to tell about home affairs. If it's not waiting in queues for hours, it's documents they've lost or didn't bother to let you know that they needed.

A colleague of mine had the wrong birth date printed in his ID. He went back to show them his birth certificate (imagine, he had to go through the whole process again) and when he got his ID 6 months later it still hadn't been fixed! So now he has to contend with the big boss phoning him in January instead of May to wish him happy birthday...

Probably one of the worst things I've ever done was loosing my ID (I should really stop beating myself up about it, but people keep reminding me of how I could be married off to some bloke in the Transkei by now). When I had searched high and low and finally accepted the grave fate that it was gone, I trudged off to home affairs and applied for a new one. This was one and a half years ago. Since then I have not laid my hands on a green ID book - having now gone through three temporary IDs.

When I went to fetch my ID the first time, they let me know that my fingerprints weren't taken correctly. But they didn't let me know. For 3 months my file had been sitting there with smudged fingerprints and they didn't even bother to let me know. And how do they get that wrong in the first place? I went back grudgingly, redid the fingerprints and prepared myself for another wait.

In the meantime I got married. So back I went to home affairs to apply for a new ID. The old application, they told me, had encountered a problem because my surname had changed. Fair enough, I thought, so I applied for a new one. Made sure the fingerprints were done carefully, got a temporary ID and thought the headache was finally over.

Now - about 2 months on - I haven't heard anything - despite their assurance that they will keep me updated with their new sms service. I entered my details on the website to find (quite horrified) that "no record of application" exists. I am slowly starting to loose my patience. Conveniently they have no email addresses that you can contact them on - probably because they wouldn't bother to answer. I've been trying to get hold of them telephonically for weeks now. I don't have time or money to be on the phone for hours waiting for them to get off their rear ends to answer the phone.

I think home affairs gives me a pretty good idea of what hell might be like.