Yeah, passports. Those little books that are a legal basis for discriminating people by a factor outside of their control, used to handwave one's unwillingness to answer the question of "why is this obvious criminal and an extremist talking head allowed here, but this calm and nice hard-working person isn't", because otherwise the answer will sound like 1930s Germany or pre-1994 South Africa.
These little books that are, more often than not, much more of a problem to get than it should be. Exceptions exist, like the German option to get one in 3 days (working days, of course, it's Germany, it is only a civilized country for 5.5-6 days a week), or even right now (for "now" being defined is "when your local Bürgeramt decides to open its doors and let you in without an appointment"), but even Americans, as far as I know, have to wait for weeks for them to be issued, and if you dare to live outside of the country of your citizenship, oh boy, almost any embassy will find an excuse on why it should last for months.
I just checked what the Swiss embassy in Berlin says on that topic, and they claim to issue the passport in 30 days plus some "appointment" handwaving. Well, it turns out I have something I have to give this country credit for.
Anyway, this post is about how passports can be a little bit abnormal, compared to what you're (not) used to.
Machine-readable zone is supposed to contain the issuing country's code, which is supposed to come from ICAO's standard, which is supposed to come from the ISO's standard on country codes, namely, the list of the 3-letter codes.
For whatever reason, Germany decided to be special, and didn't like the DEU code, so they just took the D. Just one letter. It's the only country doing so, it's in ICAO's documents, and everyone is just okay with it.
Since UK used to be much larger than it is right now, and since after fucking around by building an empire they didn't really want to "find out" by letting people move in the opposite direction, and since after the previous, second World War air travel became a normal and affordable thing, the UK decided to discriminate people in its own colonies which became either independent countries or "dependent territories", called "overseas territories" nowadays.
That's how they invented 6 types or British nationality - one for the white people ("British Citizen", country code GBR), one for Hong Kongers ("British National (Overseas)", GBN), one for modern overseas territories' residents ("British Overseas Territories Citizen", GBD), and also British Subjects (GBS), British Overseas Citizens (GBO) and British Protected Persons (GBS) for the people that were left in the newly-independent countries that were shafted both by them and the UK.
Only British Citizens can actually live in the metropolitan UK. One British Citizen and British Overseas Territories Citizen statuses can be acquired. All other not-real-citizens are supposed to just die out.
And yes, "British National (Overseas)", "British Overseas Territories Citizen" and "British Overseas Citizen" are three different nationality classes. And you thought that having four official races in Apartheid-era South Africa was too complex? Hold my ale you savage with your pencil tests, we're going to legally define 6 types of human beings, 3 of them too similar for a normal person to care, Long Live the King!
Oh, by the way, all of the British Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies have their own passport covers. Which is sometime bites holders of these passports in the ass, as it happened with a Manx couple kicked out of Turkey, because the border guards didn't believe their passports where real.
There are two things relevant to these topic that annoy me.
First, the difference between the concepts of nationality and citizenship, which is untranslatable to my mother tongue and, in 99% of the cases, meaningless, except when you're a British right-wing politician inventing 6 nationality classes, an American 19th century one trying to discriminate Samoans, or the author of the Uruguaian nationality law.
Second, the existence of ethnonationalists, especially when they whine about citizenship being acquired by immigrants (as if amount of passports of a certain country was, like the total intellect of the planet, constant, and giving a new person human rights would strip them from a local), and when they claim that "it doesn't happen anywhere else".
In reality, there are something like two countries actually not allowing people to fully naturalize, one of them being Uruguay.
In this case though, it (probably) didn't happen because some people want to experience Dresden '45 personally, but because Uruguaian nationality law distinguishes between nationality and citizenship, and the distinction is by birth.
Rights people having are the same anyway, except when it comes to issuing passports.
For quite a time, Uruguay was issuing such people passports with URY in the "document issued by" field, and their home country's country code in "nationality" field, which is stupid and made such passports practically unusable, and if the original passport was of the country doesn't allowing dual citizenship, well, tough luck.
For several months proper passports were issued... without "place of birth" field. Which is legal, but very often not accepted by other countries in practice (see the next part of the post on that), so Uruguay was forced to change its habits again.
And by "changing habits" I mean that they started putting the home countrie's code into the "document issued by" field too, which crosses the line between "accidental Apartheid" between "officially issued forgery".
Speaking of "place of birth" field, it's actually optional by ICAO standards.
Which is a correct thing to do, because people should not be forced to wear an unremovable mark imposed of them because of the things they can not control.
Several countries do actually issue passports like that, namely, Japan, which doesn't have this field at all, and Switzerland, which instead lists the "place of origin", which for the locally and biologically produced Swiss is their place of birth, but for naturalized persons, it's the place they fought through the red tape and racism to get this red book.
While I don't judge Japan for that, what I do judge both it and German is for that fact they they refused to accept Uruguaian and Vietnamese passports when they tried to do the same.
There are probably more pecularities in world's passports I forgot about by now. Thankfully, it's a blog post, not a book, so I can add something later.