Editing Getting a Social Security Card (section)

==== Enquiring After The Missing Card ====

So first we wanted to find out what happened here and form a picture of what to do. The Social Security phone lines are often backed up quite a bit. In our case, every time we called they were at 70 minutes and I didn't want to keep the phone on speaker phone by me for that long only to lose the line when I finally make it to the front or something like that. So we went in.

{| class="wikitable"
! Time !! Observation
|-
| 0907 || We arrived at this time. There were 11 people line ahead of us and the guy in front of us was #26 for the day
|-
| 0918 || We entered the building. There were 8 people in line ahead of us at the kiosk
|-
| 0924 || We received our ticket D399; currently displayed were B106, A39, C296, D377.
|-
| 0957 || Currently displayed were A47, B108, D389.
|}

The way things work is that you stand in line outside, then the security guys check your bags, and then you stand in line at the kiosk to check-in or to get your walk-in token, and then there are seats where you can sit and wait or you can stand leaning against the wall. If you've got an appointment and you arrive early you end up standing in the line anyway, but then you're called forward to the kiosk if it's around the time of your appointment. After you've checked in, they call you by the applicant's name and token number, though there are the usual screens up in front of you. The token numbers are not called in monotonic order even within the letter codes, i.e. A134 can go before A121.

Of course, after we were called, I did not record the time, but as you can imagine it was a couple of hours. At the end of the affair, we found out that:

# We'd have to apply again and yes, for the third and last time this year
# If we had arrived within 2 weeks of the projected card arrival time, we could have applied for a re-send without it hitting the limits
# Our documents were sufficient, but we'd need an application and an appointment for it

We asked for, and received, Astra's SSN again.