When you have appointments, you also have no-shows that make gaps in the schedule. This graph says Monday is a better day for missing appointments: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/art...5/figure/Fig2/

Quote:
Edited to add: The woman initially interviewed did mention post office so now unclear to me.

<<I'm not sure who you mean.>>

The first woman in your TV news video, linked above; she mentioned the PO in passing. It was unclear whether they were processing the application or she was just mailing it from there.

Since they don't allow walk-ins (Covid rules),I don't see how no-shows would help. My daughter would have to have made the appointment yesterday, before no-shows haven't shown.As of yesterday, there were no appointments for today.

The graph was for a VA hospital, which is quite different.
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I heard anecdotes of people contacting their congressional reps. office to get things expedited.

Maybe worth a try?

I renewed mine back in November or December, got it issued in late January. It would have expired in August.

She contacted her congressman. They told her that the backlog was so great that they were only able to find appointments for some cases of life and death emergency.

I think they didn't foresee that once international travel opened up, they wouldn't be able to meet the demand with the same skeleton staff they had in 2020 when international travel was mostly impossible.

As I mentioned, my daughter was told by the person who answered her call (after five days of trying) that there was only one person in the whole country fielding all calls for urgent appointments.

In today's New York Times:

Need to Renew Your Passport? Good Luck.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/14/t...gtype=Homepage

Yes, I saw that, but the situation is now much worse. The article mentions a man who flew to Seattle to snag an appointment, and a woman who drove over 9 hours each way to get an appointment that her congressman was able to find. Both of these appointments were in April. There were literally no appointments available anywhere in the US in these past few weeks, unless it was for a life-or-death emergency. We were not willing to fake a serious emergency, and potentially take the place of someone with a much more serious problem than ours.