...is to pay for Expedited Service, send it FedEx and include a return FedEx envelope.

It took exactly two weeks for me to get my passport. Although it took seven days for the website to have any information on it. Best of all, a week after I received my passport, I got an information card from the passport office telling me that my application had been received and was in process.

Let's hear it for the DHS!

The passport office in large cities has been exactly as described, even before Homeland Security bungled the rules. Chicago, for me, was the worst place on earth to try to get a passport in person in a hurry for an emergency, and that was before Sept.11.

My last passport renewal was a strange event: The passport I received, along with my old passport, arrived in only four weeks, but it had my wrong birth date. When I reported this, and noted that surely someone proofed the new passport ( say, for example, by looking at the birth date on the old passport ), the response was pure indifference. In fact, it sounded as if this sort of mistake happened all the time.

Yeah, I live in the LA area, and I didn't want to even venture to the passport office after hearing about the multi-hour lines from a co-worker. I would imagine that most major metro areas would be the same, and that DC would be extraordinarily bad.