What happened to reminders?
I travel quite a bit, so I have had TSA Precheck for years. Too many years, apparently. A couple of weeks ago I was flying to Florida to stay with my friend Sara in her beach house (I’ve mentioned before how important it is to have friends with beach houses!). The TSA Precheck notification did not show up on my boarding pass, which happens sometimes, so I went to the airline desk to get it added. The number is in there, I was told, but it must be expired. I had to stand in the regular line with people who aren’t as travel-savvy as I thought I was. Sara, who is travel-savvy, went through the Precheck line and waited for me on the other side of security (and waited, and waited, and waited…)
Once I got to the gate (fortunately with time to spare), I started investigating. That investigation involved calling my husband and having him check the expiration date on my Global Entry card (which includes TSA Precheck), and on his. Sure enough, mine had expired just two weeks before. Yikes! Did I miss a reminder? I’m usually all over these things. (Well, I thought I was. Clearly not.) My husband’s Precheck, for some reason, does not expire until the end of November 2027. (That is another issue, as we got our status at the exact same time. I will need to investigate that separately.) Lucky him, although he’ll still have to wait for me to get through regular security when we travel together so I’m not sure how much it helps. At least he can leave his liquids in his bag.
Once I was aware of the issue, I went about the renewal process. The government website says that you can start the process up to 12 months before the expiration date, and if you do that you’ll have a TWO YEAR grace period where you can keep using your TSA Precheck and Global Entry benefits while you wait for approval. But if you don’t start the process before expiration, there is NO grace period, and it could take MONTHS to get re-approved. Even if your status only expired two weeks ago. Also, they aren’t going to send any sort of notification when you’ve been approved, you just have to keep checking the website. And clearly, they aren’t going to send any reminders. I suddenly am more dangerous by applying after some random date instead of before? How does that make sense? I finished the endless forms that day, including having to list every country I’ve been to in the last several years, and paid the renewal fee. I just checked the website…no approval yet.
We used to get reminders for things. For the 40+ years I’ve had a driver’s license, I got a postcard reminder every three (and then six) years approximately 60 days before my license would expire, reminding me to go get it renewed. Those days are past, however. One of my sons learned this when he showed his license as ID at a new job and they told him it had expired. Our family clearly needs multiple reminders, however, because a few months later my husband was unable to rent a car on our family vacation because his license also was expired. (Fortunately mine wasn’t, and our rental got upgraded on that trip, so I got to drive the BMW SUV all week.) We did learn our lesson after the second time, and I successfully renewed my license this year the week before it expired. No notice needed!
That lesson only applied to our driver’s licenses, however. I check passport expiration dates obsessively…or so I thought, until the last time I checked (after returning from my Florida trip) and discovered one of my son’s passports already had expired. No reminders came for that, obviously. (Although I don’t open all the mail we get, I do in fact open anything from the government.) And because my son’s passport was juvenile (and now he is, supposedly, an adult), he has to go in person to get a new passport. At least this expiration didn’t add to the difficulty, and he can turn in the old one without needing it since it already is out of date. But until that happens, no college student trips to Cancun for him! (Maybe that’s a good thing.)
But why don’t we get reminders? In this digital era, when I get multiple spam calls, and emails, and text messages every single day, I don’t understand why our government can’t program a system to send out an email or text reminder of things that are about to expire. I get an annual reminder from Harry & David for people that I sent fruit to ten years ago! We all have too much to remember…passwords and logins and different email addresses and to pick up milk and bread on the way home…it would be such a useful service to send an indication that something you value is about to end. Non-government retailers have figured that out, but reminders for the necessary stuff isn’t happening. As I have written about previously, I can’t even remember the birthdays of people I love without a prompt, and those come up every year. So how am I going to recall that it’s time to update something that lasts for years?
I think there might be a business idea in here somewhere. I would seriously consider signing up for a service to which I give all the important dates in my life and that service does nothing but remind me of all the things I have to do. Actually, that service probably exists somewhere–I know Facebook, which I haven’t been on since 2009, still tells my “friends” every year to wish me a happy birthday–maybe that tech is already on platforms that I don’t use. But then again, I’m not sure I could find all the relevant dates, so that probably wouldn’t work anyway. When my Global Entry status finally is renewed, I’m going to have to put a note in my calendar for four years from now (a year before the actual expiration) and hope I’m still using the same calendar system in the future. Or perhaps get in the habit of checking all the things that expire every month. By the time I remember to do everything, I’ll probably be too old to travel anyway.
