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Your appointment time bears no resemblance to when you will be seen. Upon arrival, you register for a ticket number, and these are called out over the alarmingly loud intercom in a seemingly random order.
Sadly, the instructions don’t make clear that, in addition to your passport, you need to bring what’s known as an I-94 admission record, which you get when you clear customs.
This used to be stamped in your passport, but now it’s digital. However, the SSA still requires you to print and physically bring your I-94 on a sheet of paper – as I found out the hard way after waiting more than two hours. When I suggested this seemed to defeat the point of digitisation, I was told flatly: “Congress makes the rules”.
Things went better the second time. But despite having a fresh, five-year US visa, apparently my documents needed to be verified again to get my social security card. I was dispatched from the appointment with a printed confirmation (they really love paper) that says this could take up to four weeks.
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After six weeks I was inclined to make inquiries, but there’s no way to do it online. You have to call and hold for hours or book another appointment, both of which seemed too excruciating to contemplate.
It’s not just in the US government I’ve found systems wanting. In Canada, my train that was supposed to leave Montreal at 9am ultimately departed at 3pm, moved three kilometres down the track, stopped for another two hours and then went back to Montreal. The reason? A freight train had derailed (at midday, I later found out).
And connecting my home internet was a trial beyond belief. After two days of back-and-forth phone calls, a tech visit and assurances that the outage would be fixed soon, someone finally pointed out the real problem: I hadn’t agreed to the online terms and conditions.
All of these things worked out in the end. The Wi-Fi switched on, I flew home from Montreal and, after nearly eight weeks, my social security card finally arrived.
But having dipped my toes into North American life over the past two months, I’m convinced there’s plenty of waste and inefficiency for Musk to flush out. If only he would focus his many talents on the real problems, not the stuff of culture wars and conspiracies.
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