It’s 2:00 on Friday afternoon of Memorial Day weekend, and I’m waiting in line at the Tip O’Neil Federal Building in Boston to pick up my replacement passport for the one I lost. For the second time in two weeks.

I’ll note that I’ve had passports for 50 years before I lost my first one last month. I know it’s in my house somewhere, as I used it to fill out a form for my Lindblad Expeditions/National Geographic cruise to British Columbia and Alaska. Then, it just disappeared.

On Friday, September 16th, the US State Department began the test run of their online passport renewal program. Almost 24 hours later, the program met its monthly quota of 25,000 participants and shut down temporarily. Stated in a post on their website, “We are temporarily closing down the online renewal service to new customers and plan to reopen it again in October.”