The dreaded trip back into the belly of the beast (the Federal Building downtown) to visit the office of the Social Security Administration (SSA) was almost, dare I say it, pleasant.

Forewarned is forearmed I suppose.  We had heard some horror stories about the Columbia office so we got up early to be first in line.  According to the placards the office opens at 9:00 a.m. and we arrived at a quarter till.  There were already 20 or more people inside the doors and I thought to myself, oh gawd, here we go again.  But as it turned out there was some method to the madness.

To begin, there was a fancy interactive touch screen kiosk that took some basic information and then printed out your queue number.  As we settled in for what I assumed would be a long wait I was very surprised they were calling numbers and it wasn’t even opening time yet!  And there were enough windows staffed and operating that the numbers were being announced in a rapid fire manner.  We waited no more than 10 minutes before our number was announced and we approached a pleasant woman safely ensconced behind a glass partition.

She took our SSN application, treasured green card and Jee Yeun’s passport and danced her fingers across the keyboard.  As she was doing so I mentioned that I had seen on the SSA website that I could have applied for the SSN simultaneously with the green card application, but nowhere in the USCIS documents did it mention that option.  She nodded in agreement and said “we really shouldn’t have that on our webpage, because it never works.  People come in all the time who applied through USCIS but we never have a record of it”.  Sweet.

Things were going along swimmingly until we heard the sound that no one wants to ever hear under any circumstance from a government agent: “uh oh”.  She said the SSA places a ten day hold on all newly issued immigration documents.  As ours was only issued eight days prior, she could not complete processing of our application.  She shook her head and said “we really ought to put that information on our website.”  With that I could agree.

I explained I’d be leaving the country in a mere 12 days and I really needed to get an SSN for tax purposes.  Our friendly bureaucrat explained that the hold would be lifted next week and the application would be promptly processed.  She promised to send a letter when the application was completed.  And then she volunteered a key piece of information: I don’t have to wait to get the physical social security card.  If all I needed was the number, I could get that as soon as the application was finalized, although we’d have to come to the office in person to get it.   Works for me.

When I had first sat down across from little Miss Helpful I noticed she had this Groucho Marx quote on her desk: