Excluded from this are the national and expatriate children under 15, whose registration deadline falls on October 1, and the residents in Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Sharjah whose residence visas will expire this year. They will have to register by the date of renewal of their visas.

Samir Hammad, Media Supervisor, EIDA, said that the total number of applications for issuance and renewal of ID cards reached 60,000 across the UAE, on Wednesday alone. “This is the largest number of applications received by the Emirates Identity Authority since its inception, in Dubai,” he said.

The Emirates Identity Authority called on Dubai residents who had not registered for the ID card, yet, to fill out the registration form through the closest typing centre or via the Emirates ID’s website as soon as possible. EIDA has reminded companies and establishments to register their employees using social media websites.

The Emirates Identity Authority pointed out that it raised the capacity of its centres to enable them to register as many residents as possible to complete their procedures (fingerprinting and photographing). The Emirates Identity Authority’s centres yesterday received more than 26,000 customers, thereby exceeding their daily capacity of 23,000 registration transactions per day.

Nagham, one of the applicants whom managed to register, said: “I tried registering online, the error screens took a little while to figure out, and attaching documents was tricky because of dimensions and DPI.”  “To fill the form requirements, I used photoshop to make sure everything was the right size and resolution, then it was really straightforward,” she said. “I would rather spend a couple of hours filling it out online than stand in queues. More convenient.”

Another lucky applicant, Sarah R, said she went to a typing centre at 6am and left around 10.45, “It was unbelievable, I waited for hours and left with a backache. The whole waiting process was useless and it could have been easily done online instead of making us all wait, it was a bad experience,” she said.

“There was a large number of people waiting since morning. The online method is simply hard to manage, they created an online form which is only compatible with IE6, and not everyone uses that,” she added.

“I work in advertising, and I can’t begin to tell you how busy my schedule is, so I put it off until I needed to  renew my visa. But then they forced me to do it earlier as my visa is valid for yet another year,” she said.

ahmedjamal@khaleejtimes.com