This tale is not actually a saga. It was in my head, before I started the process.
I wrote a while back that I knew exactly where my cat-pee-covered passport was.
My partner and I decided to renew our passports (under a democratic administration because my partner is POC, born in Guam, and most republicans and U.S. border patrol don't even know what/where Guam is, let alone that it is a U.S. territory**). He IS, in all legality, a U.S. citizen. Since the last administration made a point of revoking "sketchy" (re: Muslim/brown people's) passports and deporting those people back to "their countries of origin," even if those people had no memory of or affiliation with that country in their lives, we knew we didn't want to wait for a new administration to say Guam doesn't count and send him back to his country of origin, which he has never been to, with a language he doesn't speak/understand.
Back to the saga:
My passport was 20 years expired, and his was closer to 40 years. I went to the government passport site and went to fill out the paperwork with my expired passport. Lo and behold, what was not in my safe box? That's right, the passport. Absolutely no clue what I did with it. Naturally, that set off an ADHD panic attack, where I started tearing around my home looking high and low, in logical and nonsensical places alike, and having no luck whatsoever. (At least I had my birth certificate in there...)
So I did the only thing I could do: go back to the site and report in the application that it was both damaged (cat pee) and lost, and no, I did not report when it was damaged or lost because I had no idea regarding either thing.
I filled out my passport application, and there was a section asking if damaged/lost, did you report it? No, because I'm an idiot. Was your passport issued more than 15 years ago? Yes! Some luck at last. I print out my application and my partners, and realize that his form would not allow my first name to be entered. It read: Last Name, nothing. (It was especially perplexing because I had no issues entering his full name on mine.) Was this going to be a problem at the application office? Probably, but there was nothing we could do.
I scheduled the appointment, which had a week wait time, for a Friday afternoon. (Early work dismissal, yay!) The government passport site said expect 60-85 minutes for processing (since it was the both of us). So we get to our 2:00pm appointment at 1:55ish, so approximately five minutes early. We didn't even get a chance to sit down to wait; the passport official called us right back.
We filled out some additional paperwork; she had us write in the incompletable fields (or errors, like misspelling my mother's maiden name), took my photo, and had us both out the door at 2:20pm with the comment: "Expect delivery in 6-12 weeks."
That is not an insignificant amount of time, between a month and a half and three months. But we didn't have a timetable to get anywhere yet.
Three (3) weeks later, we both had passports in hand. (Also, first time ever I had a government photo that didn't make me look like crap! Huzzah!) So now here with are, with passport cards to travel in countries with shared borders (Canada and Mexico), and actual book passports to travel beyond North America.
So the saga that I had made it out to be actually took only 10 minutes to fill out the application online, 25 minutes in the application office, and 3 weeks to receive them. This was by far the fastest, easiest, most direct government process I have ever experienced. (I was expecting it to be like the hell that is the Department of Motor Vehicles.)
Now we are sitting here with our passports, with nowhere to actually go, but secure in the fact that my partner will not be deported.
** My partner went to Canada once, when just birth certificates were needed for border travel. The Canadian BP said, "Guam, you're good to go," so into Canada he went. On the return trip, the U.S. BP looked at his birth certificate and said, "What is Guam? That's not a state." Canadian BP had to explain it to U.S. BP, who eventually let him through. U.S. Border Patrol needs to know what and where U.S. territories are located and that they do, in fact, make one a U.S. citizen.