A truly industrious reader (who finally got his own passport) sent the following information for anyone having passport troubles. You can find more information by reading his full comment (#51) on this post. Good luck to all who are having trouble.

National Passport Center 1-877-487-2778

Passport status requests 1-606-526-7600

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I’m posting this out of sequence. The leptin post will be the next one.

I haven’t verified any of this information, but I’m posting it as I got it for the benefit of those who are desperate for passports, but may not read all the string of comments, which grows daily.

An industrious reader writes:

An update to my earlier post and a few tips from the lessons I learned. I applied Mar. 17. Got my son’s passport on Tuesday and mine is out priority mail for delivery on Monday (we leave on Wed. Jun 20).

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The column below appeared in today’s Wall Street Journal.

A point I noticed is that travelers to Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean and Bermuda need to make sure to take their receipts showing that they had applied for passports. So, don’t head for one of these places with birth certificates, picture IDs, and forget to take your passport receipt.

Frustrated travelers who paid an extra $60 to get their U.S. passports expedited and still had to wait for them can now get a refund from the government.

The decision to refund the money, disclosed in a State Department document sent to members of Congress, represents the latest effort to come to grips with a massive backlog in passport applications that has ruined or delayed summer vacation plans for thousands in the U.S.

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A reader posted a comment about how her long-awaited trip to Scotland is likely going to get screwed up this summer thanks to the incompetence of the people at the State Department. In her comment she included a link to an article in today’s Los Angeles Times that, if accurate, will be totally dispiriting to anyone with a trip coming up who is waiting for a passport.

At the Los Angeles passport office, more than 150 people began lining up at 4 a.m. Tuesday, hoping to pick up their passports that had been promised them weeks before. The office, which is in the Federal Building in Westwood, provides last-minute passports for travelers living in the southern section of California and portions of Nevada.

Many of them had a flight within a day or two and couldn’t get through to anyone at the State Department either by phone or e-mail even though many had applied at least 12 weeks ago. Some who did get through were told that their passport had been express mailed to them a week earlier, only to be told later that it actually hadn’t left the building and was unlikely to get to them in time.

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I went to pick up the kids last night at DFW airport. Our son called as I was pulling into the airport to tell me they were on the ground and taxiing in. He said that he wanted to let me know they were down because they were informed on the plane that all cell phones had to be turned off while going through customs or they would be confiscated. What’s the rationale for this? Who knows? Because they can?

I had our daughter-in-law’s passport with me in the car so in case she was hassled my son – who had a valid passport – could come get hers and take it back so that she could get through.

After about 45 minutes of my waiting curbside, they showed up. Here’s what happened in passport control:

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