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By night, Kaley Levene is a Starbucks barista in Port Moody. By day, she’s an entrepreneur, waiting in lineups at your local passport office so that you don’t have to.

While waiting in line at Sinclair Centre to get her passport last week before she heads to Australia in early June, she received a call from her father offering to pay her an hourly wage to stand in line for him at the Sinclair Centre passport office in downtown Vancouver when he did not have time to go himself.

Her father was only her first customer in her new career as a professional line-sitter as she cashes in on the hours it has been taking people to apply for passports. “I only have like a month to make all the money that I need, so I might as well get money where I can,” Levene said. After earning about $200 on her first day, she has since extended her line-sitting services to others.

“I waited about eight hours to get my passport,” she said. “My dad paid me, his boss paid me, and then a random lady on the street paid me,” she said. “I’m going away and trying to save money, but I work nights so I don’t really have very much to do during the day, so it’s perfect.”
At the time she was holding a place in line for only one person, but said that she had five more ask her to hold spaces for them in line at the office at Sinclair Centre. But she is not yet sure when she’ll be waiting in line again. “I don’t like to do this a lot, it’s not like I’ve done it very much,” she said. “I don’t know if that’s illegal or anything.”

Sitting behind her in line was retired teacher Colleen MacDonald from Belcarra. She woke up at 5:30 to get to Sinclair Centre and at 10:30 a.m. had been waiting for appoximately three hours amidst the noises of downtown traffic and Canada Line construction.

Though MacDonald filled out the online application to streamline the wait, she still had to sit in line to drop off her application.

“What I don’t understand is why they don’t come around and just take our names and say, okay, you’re probably going to be in around 11 ‘til 12, come back around then,” she said. “Go to Disneyland, they give you a ticket to come back at a certain time so you can go in and spend the day.”

“I had to put my life on hold to come and do this.”

She said an employee in the passport office circulated through the lineup and passed out earplugs to help protect patrons from the excessive noise. But besides this, she said that office workers have only circulated the lineup once an hour to move people around.

“They’re really not giving much information,” she said. “We’re all civilized, we can all put our name on a list and come back at a certain time, and then we have a short line.”

This entry was posted on Monday, April 23rd, 2007 at 10:28 pm and is filed under Vancouver News.