With rare exception (*cough* TSA’s social media presence *cough*), one generally wouldn’t put the words “U.S. government” and “sense of humor” in the same sentence. Well, unless you include the words “doesn’t have a” between the two.
To be fair, the government has made its share of SNAFUs, like the guy who got his Global Entry card and it had someone else’s face on it. Or this woman’s driver’s license photo that wasn’t even a photo of a person. But for whichever government agencies it was, it was seemingly just business as usual – maybe an apology but nothing about the absolute ridiculousness of the situation they caused.
But sometimes people want to see how far they can go. Not in a malicious way – just in a fun, “there’s a line and I’m going to go right up to that line and see what happens” sort of way. That’s what one Ali Spagnola decided to do.
According to her Wikipedia page (because doesn’t everybody have their own Wikipedia page?), Spagnola is an American musician and YouTuber. However she also has an Instagram account with close to 600k followers. So…she’s an influencer. And Influencers gotta influence. Or at least get views. So when Spagnola needed to renew her passport, she decided to go right up to that line I mentioned, and wear something a little outlandish for her passport photo.
A big honkin’ clown bow tie. A bright yellow one with huge colorful polka dots on it.
Because you can renew online, there’s no one to tell you “No, don’t wear that.” As long as the U.S. government’s passport renewal page says your photo is OK, you should be good to go, right?
Spagnola explains in her video that there are indeed rules of what you should and shouldn’t do for your passport photo, but specified that for clothing, the online rules just say, “…attire must not block a portion of your face.” So off she went, and did her self portrait wearing the clown tie.
And a white tuxedo shirt. As one does. “…so they know I’m very put together and serious,” Spagnola said, tongue deeply implanted in cheek.
Even Spagnola admitted how stupid the idea was, but lo and behold, it worked – the government’s passport renewal page accepted the photo.
Crazy.
Here’s her video of what she did.
The aftermath
Anyway, this all happened about 6 weeks ago. There’s some lag time in getting renewals back and she said the passport page said she could expect to have her new passport in hand in about 4-6 weeks.
Sure enough, 4 weeks later, her new passport arrived. Here’s how it looked:
So yeah…she may have tried to troll the government with her photo, but they trolled her right back and essentially said it was fine.
How does something like this even happen?
My guess is that it’s all automated. Once the photo was approved by the State Dept’s AI, it probably was never actually looked at by humans.
Until recently, it wouldn’t have passed muster
The thing is, the rules for passport photos used to specifically say that the photo had to be “taken in clothing normally worn on a daily basis” (it also said you couldn’t wear a uniform or cammo, but doesn’t anymore). But I guess the rules changed, so a big honkin’ clown bow tie is A-OK now.
Meanwhile…
Meanwhile, for the next 10 years, Ali Spagnola will have a conversation piece for any time an official looks at her passport photo.
Well, and several thousand Insta views, too. 😉
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