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It really doesn’t matter who’s in charge, the government is always a hot mess. No one knows that better at the moment than a guy named Sherman K.

Sherman just spent the past 6 months or so trying to get Global Entry status. He did everything the way it’s supposed to be done but it still wasn’t easy. He filled out the application in the middle of the year. Then he got a letter in August, saying he wasn’t approved (something about missing paperwork), but a week later he got another letter that said he was approved after all. Then, not surprisingly, he had a heck of a time finding a place to get an interview. After checking online for about 2 or 3 months, he finally got an appointment and wound up having to drive an hour from home (which some people would consider lucky/easy) for that.

Finally, with everything done and paid for, he was 100% approved and Sherman K.’s Global Entry card came in the mail at the end of December!

There was just one problem…

“So I got my global entry card in the mail today but who is this, the last time I checked I am a black man 😂”

Yup. They put the wrong photo on Sherman’s Global Entry card.

This is what Sherman K. (or at least the Sherman K. I’m talking about) looks like:

People made a lot of jokes and comments to Sherman about the situation – mostly suggesting the different world he was going to live in because of his newfound “white privilege” (cuz yeah y’all – it’s a thing), and some about what the “other guy” was going to start experiencing now that, according to his Global Entry card, he was a person of color.

But Sherman seemed to be good-natured about the issue and took it all in stride. He just wanted to get a Global Entry card that he could use.

He was on his way to Ghana over the New Year, so he planned to stop by the Global Entry airport location before his trip. That didn’t work out, so he figured he’d take care of it when he got back to the U.S.

As it turned out, he didn’t even have to wait that long. While he was still in Ghana, a representative from U.S. Customs and Border Protection called him and left a voice mail about retaking his picture. He figures the guy whose picture was on his card has HIS picture on HIS card and contacted the Global Entry program to get it fixed.

Now, I get it. People who work to get those Global Entry cards processed are probably overwhelmed because so many are applying for Global Entry (and, of course, the Department of Homeland Security is still claiming a backlog because of the government shutdown from a year go). But really, assuming the problem is that two people had the same name (and who knows, maybe even the same birth date – although based on his picture, the white Sherman K. looks a good decade older than if he had been born the same date black Sherman K. was), I would suspect that happens a LOT. I mean, the United States may be “the great American melting pot,” but we still have a lot of people with the same first and last names (I used to have a friend with a very common first name and a very common last name – her doctor in her small town had FOUR patients with that name). You’d think they’d have a system in place for when something like that happens. Or at the very least, for someone to notice that Sherman K. #1 and Sherman K. #2 had totally different skin color?

Oh wait, I forgot – the government is always a hot mess. Never mind.

*** MANY, many thanks to Sherman K. for allowing us to use his story and photos!

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This post first appeared on Your Mileage May Vary