1.   The State Department, which administers the passport office, Declined to comment.

2.   You just fill it out, then send it in to the passport office.

3.   At passport offices, though, life and death were the order of the day.

4.   At a State Department passport office at Rockefeller Center in midtown Manhattan, scores of people seeking passports for trips in the coming days were turned away.

5.   At the passport office in lower Manhattan, Schwarz, with Schimel at his side, stepped up to a bulletproof window and handed over his papers.

6.   At the Reseda passport office, however, there was more business than usual, with several people awaiting crucial documentation.

7.   Because they are at the passport offices every day, the professional bureaucracy-busters know the procedures cold.

8.   A New Jersey writer, headed for Brazil, said someone in the New York passport office hung up on her when she called for an appointment.

9.   After a while, Reichert told his wife that the sole remaining employee in the passport office said he would call Washington to see what could be done.

10.   Albright chose the passport office as her first stop to underscore that the foreign affairs budget matters to ordinary Americans.