Birth Certificate
My wife and I recently filed for our Passports. Of course, this requires all of our vital records to be sent to the Department of State for them to sit on for several months. My wife was worried that her very fragile birth certificate would be destroyed, so I ordered her a replacement (two actually). We were both born in the State of Ohio, so I got on my phone and Googled how to order birth certificates from Ohio.
The Ohio website has a link that reads “Visit our online order portal by clicking here”. Which I did and that took me to a section of the same website to order her copies. As I stated, I actually ordered two copies. In a few weeks an envelope arrived and when I opened it, inside was one single copy of her birth certificate, not the two that I ordered.
I went back to that website to see how I could complain about my $21.50 missing copy. There was a support email, which I emailed and I spent about a dozen emails going back and forth to find that I needed to contact the place that I ordered them from. Hmmmmm, there is the problem as I tried to explain to the person on the other end of my emails how I ordered my copies.
They kept insisting that I contact the place I ordered from, over and over again. After a while, I think they finally got the picture that I did indeed order them from their website.
Come to find out, you order from their website, but the copies are fulfilled in a variety of locations and I need to contact that particular location. And how do I know what location fulfilled the order? Well from the envelope, of course, that was tossed in the trash a week or so earlier. I mean, why would you keep an envelope? I know, I will now receive dozens of emails, from people who keep their envelopes, lol. I do not, end of that story, and back to the blog post.
So it looks like I might need to get Visa in on this one as the State of Ohio isn’t being any help. I can’t believe that they don’t have a global record of this.
Wish me luck!
Welcome to the Average Joe Weekly blog. This is basically my place on the web where I can help spread some of the knowledge that I have accumulated over the years. I served 10+ years in the Marine Corps on Active Duty, but that was some 25 years ago.
