How to get a US Passport in 1.5h Hours

This is a true story.

Last Thursday I flew from RSA in San Francisco back to Seattle. When I got back I helped my wife pack the bags for our trip to New Zealand. At about midnight, after we'd done all the packing, I got the passports out of the safe and went over then one last time. At this point I realized our son's passport had expired Sep 06. The 06 looked a lot like an 08, but it really was an 06. So here we are midnight the day before we're about to fly to New Zealand, and we have a bum passport. What to do?

We phoned customs agents at LAX and SEA, but they basically laughed, giving us a near-zero chance of getting out. The guy we spoke to at LAX suggested we try to go anyway!

At 7AM, Friday, we phoned the Dallas passport office becuase they'd be awake! They gave us a national phone number to call to see if we could get an appointment in Seattle. We 'phoned the number and got a noon appointment. Which, we are told, is very, VERY rare; getting an appt on the same day is near-impossible. Our flight from SEA to LAX (and then to AKL) was 3:55PM, so we realized we were cutting things really fine. My wife suggested we fill the car with the luggage as if we were going to the airport anyway. We got all the paperwork we needed to get Blake a new passport (birth cert, new photo, old passport, flight details, both parents [tha would be my wife and me] and a check book) and decided to head to the passport office early at 10AM.

We got there at 10:30AM.

We told the security people our plight, and they politely told us to get in line.

When we got to the front of the line, we told the lady in the office our story, they checked our appt number, took all the paperwork and told us to come back at 12:15PM.

We came back at noon.

They had a new passport for Blake.

Seriously, they had a new passport for Blake! Sure, we were $150 lighter, but who cares!

So yes, you CAN get a passport in 1.5 hours :)