Biggest imnigration/customs pet peeves
 

I don't know if it's just for me but I'm always disappointed with the way immigration people put stamps in your passport. they do it in a way which allow to suspect they have myopia, glaucoma, hand tremor and severe motion disorder. And they do it without any regard to how much space is left in traveler's passport. their biggest glory is to spoil a free page - needless to say that you have lots of pages already stamped - they manage to find empty one and put their stamp in the middle.
It is just inconsiderate!
I know some countries provide grid on passport pages, supposedly to help "targeting" - but as far as I noticed it does not work.

AX

Not my experience. Thailand, Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Argentina, Brazil, Poland, Australia, Estonia all very good at making optimal use of space on visa pages of passport. Indonesia, USA and Canada are worse, especially one US officer at LAX who managed to put one stamp across two pages.

the only stamp in my passport that was carefully and lovingly stamped was from Liechtenstein.

Of course, they do not have passport control and the stamp isn't free. The nice lady at the national tourist office stamped it, perfectly in the center of a free page.(like I told her to do) :)

That bugs me as well. One trick I read on here but haven't got around to trying yet is to staple the blank pages together (with the bottom of the stapler turned around to make it easy to remove if needed). Apparently those pages generally get skipped over and they'll find a half-empty page elsewhere.

I need to try this trick because I'm getting low on double-blank pages in my passport...

Biggest Peeve: Mutliple Queues with Multiple Servers
 

I always seem to end up in the slowest line even if the queue length seems to be the shortest. There always seems to be someone ahead of me who is held up for an inordinate length of time while the other queues empty out. In many US airports the Immigration have the right idea with a single queue and multiple Immigration servers and I wish that method were adopted all over the world.

I get annoyed when the lines are so long, you can't tell if you are in the correct line because you cant see the sign at the front for nationals or foreigners. I have to walk up a ways and then backtrack after finding the line I am supposed to be in. This usually happens in older and smaller airports.

Yes, US immigration people do not like to share pages with other countries, and they do like to center their stamps. The last passport I discarded (because there weren't any blank pages for visas left) had 8 pages in it that only contained one US stamp.

I use my own counter-tactics against immigration officers from anywhere that look for blank pages to stamp, by stapling double-blank pages together to try to keep them clean. It's very effective, and I've never yet been asked about them, even by US immigration, although they're actually only pinned together with the stapler so that it's very fast to unpick them if I need to.

Some places dont care where they put the stamp, even on top of other stamps.
Some take care to find a used page ^
Some take care to find an empty page (Australia for instance :mad: )
Some even manage to stamp across the middle of 2 empty pages (US :mad: ).

It irritates me (probably irrationally so) at those airports that seem to have a huge number of people milling you around, telling you how to queue, and inviting you to move to a free desk.

You know, if you hired more immigration officers instead, perhaps the huge queues wouldn't be there to need helping out with...

I've seen the worst queue management in DXB, 10 different lines
for the same thing and you can never figure out when one closes and
when a new ones start. You may get through in 30 seconds or 2 hours.

Also hate the US practice of stamping the empty page everytime.
I have a passport that is 8 month old and it is almost full now.
I've found Australia and UK among the best stampers, US the worst.
and in few countries I was able to convince them to double
stamp a grid to save me some pages. Now I have some pages with
7-8 stamps and some with just one.

Witnessing racism and sexism in action at immigration/customs.

Returning to US
 

Both my partner and I are US citizens and when we return to the US together, we usually approach the passport control desk together - just like we do for the airline and hotel check-in desks, UK immigration desks, everything else we do together in our lives, etc.

Most of the time we are asked "Are you family, with one form - if not, one of you has to step back and wait until I complete the first person's entry and then I'll call up the second person." Sometimes this is said nicely (and almost apologetically) and sometimes very harshly. I think I have been selected for agricultural screening once when we both went up together, because all I had with me was chocolates in a wrapped & sealed box - even the customs/agriculture inspector said "you should not have been sent here."

Of course, if we were allowed to marry each other, we would be "family," have one form and be able to be admitted back to the US together. BUT WE ARE NOT ALLOWED TO MARRY, so we find this process very annoying and unpleasant every time we come back home.

:(

JK-SFO

I have a "gridded" passport. But last week at MEX I was surprised when the official painstakingly centered the stamp on the top margin of the page! He did the same for my kid's PP (ungridded) so I guess it's a MEX thing.

I had a DHS dorf at Dulles stamp on the center of my Brazilian visa when I explicitly told him that he should NOT stamp on my visa especially as there were plenty of other pages that were blank.