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Maid Permit, Passport and Contract Renewal 2021 Part 5

Update 7 July 2022: So I decided to use my lunch break to head over to Shah Alam PKNS building to see if I can sort this nightmare maid passport scenario once and for all. Its a long drive but I finally reached there, found a parking and found myself wandering around the hallways of this immigration, reminiscent of a rat looking for its way around a maze. This twisted building is even worse than the DUTA, because this just has hallways and a cacophony of human noises and human smells. It feels surreal than in 2022, we are still floundering in such terrible conditions for immigration.

I finally sourced where the maid renewals were done and duly queued again, and after around 40 minutes, I finally got to the front. What irritated me second most was that the person behind absolutely had no sense of personal space. You know those morons that stand draped over your shoulder and when you move forward in the queue, they just step next to you like they want to smell your ass? So I had a moron behind me breathing down on me, as if if he stood nearer to me, he could then be merged with me as a single human and he can get to skip one person in this God-forsaken queue in this God-forsaken hellhole called Immigration. Second most. Because what irritated me most was what followed.

Finally reached the immigration officer, a young man who had a sneering look on his face of a man who, at this young age, had lost all hope of any life renewal and now faced the next 40 years of his working life suffering behind this soulless institution called Malaysian Immigration Department. I explained to him and he said, “Yes, this is the correct queue.”

Before I could respond and celebrate, he continued, “But we are out of Queue Numbers. Come back again another time.”

It’s 2 pm. On a work day. They close at 5. There is 3 more hours of actual work hours. And you now say you can’t service because of no more queue number. What Godless country are we living in, that at 2 pm, these buggers called Immigration would mail it in and say, no more queue number.

NO MORE QUEUE NUMBER? In the year 2022??!

I looked at him incredulously and he just looked back in his dimly lit eyes, bereft of any empathy, sympathy or general signs of actual life. I felt, truly and I am not demeaning his work – I really really felt that I was talking to a zombie, or a soulless person. Because I knew whatever I said, was meaningless and he would only repeat himself. There was no processing capability, no ability to say other things or explain anything, just a mindless “No more queue number.”

I asked him, “What time do you guys run out of queue numbers?” – paraphrasing, “When does your lazy ass actually do any work?”

And I could swear, he gave a smirk of satisfaction, an almost sneering, inyourface you sonofab*tch useless citizen of Malaysia look to me, and half spat, half spoke :- “Morning, just queue early in the morning.”

This is Malaysia. And we all wonder why we get hated so much by Malaysians, Singaporeans, Zimbabweans and all citizens of this known world and also any unknown aliens not found yet in our galaxy. This is truly the most inept, useless, bottom of the barrel sort of service we’ve come to expect from our immigration.

The irony is that, the IC department is very good and everyone has great reviews. It’s almost as if the IC department is the blue eye department of the whole ministry, while the maid passport division is where all the $hit officers flow to like a diarrhea purge of the body. It doesn’t matter if you are from the Duta or Shah Alam or anywhere else, the immigration is truly a nightmare to deal with. I rather wish a thousand deaths by quartering on someone that to have to deal with the Immigration department of Malaysia.

So another day, another time loss, and still nothing to show for it. The war against the ever invincible Immigration Department continues.

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Passport Renewal 2022

*Update 22 June 2022* – A friend of mine attested that he went at 6 pm to Duta branch and there was ZERO queue. He got in and out by 6.15 pm, new passport renewal. That is approximately 2.27% of the waiting time I bloody endured when I went in the bloody morning!!! So just read below for musings of a complete idiot.

So, my passport is expiring in October 2022 so I had the unfortunate task to go and renew my passport. After the horror stories we hear from all over, I thought it’s perhaps good to document this for posterity.

So now, for passport renewal, it’s a hybrid circumstance of renewing online and collecting offline.

The online is found at https://imigresen-online.imi.gov.my/eservices/myPasport

This may change, as time of writing is June 2022.

First, the good – the Online experience is not as excruciating as you’d think. I mean the interface does look like it’s been designed by a five year old kid assisted by his llama, but it seems to be functional, if not aesthetically resembling a dead iguana’s feces. You basically key in all the necessary information in there and I think the biggest challenge you will face is to submit in your passport ‘photo’. These days, everyone is a damn professional so , everyone (including myself) thinks we can take passport photos. I tried. And tried and tried. It’s a work of futility. It’s almost impossible to get the dimensions they want with a selfie. So, you can get someone to take for you, but you can’t have shadows. So, you need to look for the right lighting environment and… for me, I just sort of gave up and wen to the nearest photo studio, paid RM20 and got a bunch of passport photos plus the softcopy photos. After that, I took the softcopy, and in the immigration site, uploaded the softcopy as it is. There are some ‘adjustments’ you apparently need to make but don’t worry about it. You don’t need to zoom and stuff, just make sure the oval circle has your face in it. It’s auto adjusted for you post submission. In fact, I zoomed into my face thinking I was getting the right dimension and submitted – a few days later, they emailed me telling me that my photo was rejected due to dimension.

So, while the instructions are super unclear – just submit the studio shot as it is, put your face in the oval circle – which should fit, unless you have an alien-like structure head and gills on your neck – and you are done.  Select the place that you wish to pickup your passport – I selected Duta (KL Headquarters) – which might be a mistake.

Then make sure you make the payment and you will receive the receipt in your email.

Print out the receipt. They will claim that once your passport is ready you will receive another email stating so. Well, you likely will receive an email, in the next cycle of your afterlife. So, yeah, when a Malaysian government agency like immigration tells you to wait for an email, you don’t. In fact, they have already known this email nonsense is fake, because in their receipt, it actually states, if you don’t receive any email, just comelah, after 3 days.

So off I went, like a hero to Duta at around 9.30 the week after that. I went into the front door, went up the escalator and saw this HUGE queue of homo-sapiens in front of the passport office. I said, “This poor suckers must be the ones who are doing walk-ins and not aware of the online application, or just too stupid to know how to do it. Lucky I am so smart.” I sauntered up to the officer and the front and told them I already done everything and I am here to collect, can I go in?

He looked at me and did not even bother saying a word, and just nodded to the queue languidly. I am like, Yeah. But I did everything on line. I am not lining up with these losers who are walking in.

And he said, “This is the line for online collection.”

I kid you not. I was like a hobbit looking in terror as the gates of Mordor was opening and the Nazgul was flying out to eat my head. The line snaked throughout the entire floor to the next wing. It was an awesome and spectacular sight to behold, a true magnificent testimony and legacy on the slowness, inefficiency and general ineptitude of our government agency. It was terrifyingly beautiful, and encapsulated everything we love and detest about Malaysia. This is the Malaysian spirit – the ability to spit in the face of modernization, to stomp at the body of efficiency and to cackle in the presence of good governance. We dare you, modern technology and good intentions to serve the rakyat who pays their taxes – we dare you to ask us to improve from the ways that we have been doing since the stoneage. That is, line up, you useless twit, get in queue and wait for six hours to get your stupid passport done!!

Needless to say, I gave up and left.

2 weeks after that, after I have plucked enough courage again to face this dragon of incompetence, I went to the same place at 7.15 am. I was smart this time. Instead of going in the front door, I went straight to the back, walked up the staircase and quickly got in line. Yes. At 7.15 there was already a queue all the way to the next wing.

So I stood in line for 2 plus hours, before at around 9.30 I finally reached the front of the line. Congratulations you have passed the first level of this game of death by a thousand queues. The past 2 hours was the queue to take the number to the queue. Yes. It was a queue to get a queue number. W.T.F.

Received the queue number, and had close to 50 people in front of me Everyone cramming into the waiting area. Waited till around 11.30 before my turn finally came and I went there, took my thumbprints. To be fair, once you are seated with an officer, the process actually is quite short, less than 10 minutes or so they can process you. They told me to wait another hour for the passport to be processed.

So you still have your queue number but it gets stuck behind another queue to get your passport. And lo and behold, I had another 50 people again in front of me.

At this point, I had no choice but to wait. And Wait.

Finally, at around 1 pm, they called me and it was as if St Michael himself had announced my name at the Pearly Gates. I jumped up from my stupor and went bounding over to the officer, away from all these other losers who were waiting.

They passed my passport to me (It had been available probably for some time) and asked me if I wanted a passport sleeve costing 25RM. I was afraid to say no. It was like Don Corleone asking me if I wanted to buy his protection. Of course I said yes. I was so scared if a no brought further red-tape, or backroom processing. They probably would go, “This bastard said No. Stop the passport processing. Let him wait and rot here for the next 25 hours of his life, this cheapskate idiot.”

So please, just pay whatever this officer wants you to pay and get the flaming heck out of there.

So finally, 1.30 pm I was out. A full six hours of a queue’s version of hell.

Now, how do we avoid this worse case scenario. For one, you could try to go at night. I wasn’t sure Duta was opened but the officer told me yes – just come over here around 6 and note they take a break from 7- 8 before commencing all the way to 10pm. Now this is written in June 2022. Things my have change.

Secondly, you may want to choose another office, like maybe another immigration office in a far off place like Shah Alam, Perak, Negeri Sembilan, Melaka, the Moon, or the planet Arakkis. Anywhere except Duta. You maybe could face with smaller crowds there, so I made a mistake opting to take it at the most crowded office in Malaysia.

If you guys are intending to do this passport renewal, good luck and may God be with you all.

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Maid Permit, Passport and Contract Renewal 2021 Part 1

Honestly, this topic is turning out to be far more popular than all my golf writeups has been. It goes to show that either my golf writing (and golf) is extremely crap or Malaysians generally have major issues in knowing WTF is going on when it comes to maid permit renewals. I would gravitate to the second. Really, even I find myself coming back to these articles on this blog to refresh my memory everytime the maid renewal season comes up. So yeah, I go back and literally read my own blog to remember how to do certain things.

So now, its 2021 and this time, its the big one. I call it the 3 in 1. Maid Passport Renewal, maid Permit Renewal and Maid Contract Renewal! Let’s start with the first permutation:

a) Passport Renewal and Passport Extension: The Embassy

Now, keep in mind that when you want to renew a PERMIT, the passport needs to be ONE YEAR valid. It means it needs to have a 12 month window there. If you were an idiot like me (who never learned 4 years back in 2017), and just sort of assumed that it’s 6 months based on our normal expiry buffer for travelling, you’d end up in this blog thinking how absolutely numskull you were in doing that.  I am even more stupid in that I reminded myself not to be so stupid back in 2017 when the exactly same issue occurred – the issue of the passport not having 12 months validity left, and you want to renew permit, and you do not have the time to renew the passport (renewal of passport generally will be around 2 months). In my case, this is October and the permit is expiring in around 4 weeks. Well done.

So I now have the extra task to extend the current passport while waiting for the new passport. Why extend you ask? Well, it is so that I can renew the permit, O Simple Reader. Because the new passport won’t be out in time, before the current passport expires, therefore I need to extend the passport to another 2 years. Why 2 years? Don’t know. It seems this is the only option and it cost me RM96. So RM288 (for new passport ) + RM96 (for being stupid).

Now this is MCO, so in my case the Philippines Embassy has a sniper who will headshot anyone who comes in without an appointment. So therefore you need to get an appointment first. So head to http://philembassyklappointment.biz/app/public/ and in the drop down, select Passport Application.

You will then see ALL DAYS are FULL. You will. No matter what day you are reading this article, I double dare you to go to that site (as long as appointment is still needed), every day will be Full, from today to the second coming of Christ. What you need to do is to wake up the next day at 7.55 am. Or earlier. And quickly go to the website at EXACTLT 8 am. Not later. And you will be able (if you are lucky) to get some empty slot days and then select the hour you want to have the appointment. I suggest you take the earliest available slot (if you get it).

Fill in all the information, like name, address, email, phone number and make sure you get the appointment slip.

Once you have the appointment slip, bring your maid, photocopy of the passport data page, the passport itself,  the printout of the appointment slip and make your merry way to the embassy. Oh yes, please download the passport renewal form at

http://www.philembassykl.org.my/main/images/Passport_Form_2018-Renewal.pdf

And you can fill it up and bring it along.

Now due to the MCO, employers (and agents) are not allowed into the embassy, so you must give your maid the necessary money (just pass RM400 or so to be safe) and the specific instruction for her to EXTEND the current passport validity. Else, she might just happily renew the passport and then you are screwed, because you won’t have a valid passport to tie the permit to (new passport hasn’t arrive).

It will take pretty long for all process to finish. We took the first slot at 9 am and we were only done around 1 pm. So just chill, go to a cafe somewhere and get some work done while waiting. Don’t worry, there is more to come.

a) Passport Renewal and Passport Extension: The Immigration

The next step is to go to the Immigration. Why, you ask. Well, it is to inform them that the passport has been extended and that they need to make it valid in their system once more in order for you to renew the permit. Its similar to you asking them to change the passport when you get a new one. Except now, its just an extended old one. So later on, once you get the new passport you need to go to the immigration again and transfer the permit over to the new passport. Yeah, it’s dog work.

The first question asked is, does our Malaysian Immigration in October 2021 have any booking or scheduling system similar to the Philippines Embassy? You can look at http://sto.imi.gov.my/e-temujanji but it doesn’t look like it applies if you want to just extend the maid permit in their system. I don’t know. Anyway, I headed over to the Duta immigration at around 9.30 am. Its probably better to be there earlier since it opens at 7.30 am but I couldn’t be arsed about waking up so early. Make sure you bring the maid’s passport (no need maid), and that the passport already has an extension to it. You can photostat if you want, but you won’t be needing it (at least for me). Do note that the immigration only handles Foreign worker/maid processing up to 1 pm, so you need to get all these done in the morning.

Go up the escalator and make sure you queue up at the right queue. There is a room for Malaysian Passport, and another room for Foreign Workers/Maid. Once you queue up, just wait and then when its your turn, go in and there will be a temporary table there with an officer, take a temperature, and they will give you a form to fill up for COVID declaration etc. So good idea to bring your own pen to write it down. Actually even if you don’t fill it up, no one will know, because at the end you are supposed to put it back on the table, but I noticed many forms there were empty except for the temperature. One of those strange things, I guess of government process that is utterly useless.

Explain to the officer at the first table that you have extended the maid’s passport and you need to update the system. He will understand and instruct you to go to the first counter, and she/he will give you a waiting number.

Then you just wait. For me, it was just around 20 minutes or so and then my turn came up, I explained to the officer again , he took the passport and clickety clack on the keyboard, and in 5 minutes, he looked up and said, OK. I was so shocked at his efficiency I thought he was joking. I asked, “OK? Sudah siap?” He just nodded grumpily and waved me away like an annoying fly.

Wow. Talk about fast.

I didn’t believe their system would be updated in real time. I didn’t. I am a non-believer in the Malaysian Immigration department. So right after that, I went to my office, logged into MyEG and tried to do the permit renewal. Previously it stopped once I clicked proceed and said that the passport was not valid without 12 months.  I was utterly shocked when the system allowed me past that stage now, meaning that I could now renew my maid’s permit using the old, extended passport.

Syabas indeed, Malaysia, I am in tears on how proud I am of you. It is like seeing the child that everyone gave up on as being an utter idiot in school who failed his Matematik and Moral, become the first man to land on Mars and set up a colony there and terraform the entire planet and save mankind.

So now, half of the work done already – we still need to

a) Renew Maid Visa on old extended passport

b) Renew Maid Contract for 2 years

c) Transfer Maid Visa from old extended passport to new passport once received from Embassy

This feels like an RPG game where you have to complete side quests before you can win the game. Bring it on!