Birth Certificate WTF
My wife is planning a ski trip to Whistler which is in Canada which under the new rules means she needs a passport. In order to get a passport she needs her birth certificate, which her mom lost years ago. So she went online to try to order it. She was born in Louisiana which requires that you use a company called VitalChek if you want to order online. So she went to their web form and started filling it out. She gets to the part where it asks for you parent’s names and runs into a problem. Her father is not listed on her birth certificate, certainly not the norm, but far from unheard of. Well, it is a required field on the web form, and there is no option for “not listed” or N/A or anything like that and they do check your submission against the records so you can’t enter incorrect information. So she calls on the phone and is told that this is a known issue and she will have to travel to LA and order it in person and it will take 4-6 weeks. Further inquiries reveal that there is an option to do it by mail and it will only take 3-4 months. Neither of these will allow her to get her passport in time for her trip. Luckily, her friend Jess apparently has unknown skills as a hacker and figures out the solution to get the online order to go through
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The order goes through and we got the certificate in the mail a few days later. Why did this work? My guess is that the original paper document actually had “No Father Listed” typed in the space for the father’s name and they simply scanned it into their database and parsed it as a space delimited name. Undoubtedly there are a large number of people who are shown in the database as children of a Mr. N.F. Listed.
January 15th, 2008 at 4:16 pm
How about “Stupid Sperm Donor” as a listing?
That’ll work, too.